Remote Dev Bindings

Some Cloudflare bindings can’t be emulated locally:

• Workers AI — calls the live model gateway.
• Vectorize — there’s no local index.
• Browser Rendering — needs the real headless browser fleet.
• AI Search, Dispatch Namespace, and certain RPC paths.

For those, wd dev can wire the binding through to the deployed resource instead of miniflare. Mark the resource dev.remote: true:

resources: {
  embeddings: {
    type: "vectorize",
    dimensions: 1024,
    metric: "cosine",
    bindings: { "apps/api": "EMBEDDINGS" },
    dev: { remote: true },
  },
}

When wd dev builds the per-worker override at .wrangler-deploy/dev/<worker>/wrangler.dev.jsonc, it emits the binding into the right wrangler section with experimental_remote: true:

{
  "extends": "../../../apps/api/wrangler.jsonc",
  "vectorize": [
    { "binding": "EMBEDDINGS", "experimental_remote": true }
  ]
}

The override is layered on top of your real wrangler.jsonc via wrangler’s extends mechanism, so the runtime IDs (and any other properties) flow through unchanged.

Coverage

Resource type	dev.remote honoured?
KV	✅
D1	✅
R2	✅
Hyperdrive	✅
Vectorize	✅
Queue producer	✅
Queue consumer	n/a (no env binding)
DNS	n/a (terminal resource)

Caveats

• Requires Wrangler 4.
• The deployed resource must already exist in the stage you’re targeting. wd apply --stage <stage> first; then wd dev --stage <stage> will point at those resources.
• Network calls hit live Cloudflare edge — counts against your real account quotas.