Cloud Function Repository

NOTE: This is Alpha-Technology. Things will change.

see: https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/

About

Google Cloud Functions (GCFs) act as opaque/blackbox functions which sit in the cloud. As they use a NodeJS Runtime Enviornment, they support a vary wide variety of functionality. See https://www.npmjs.com/ for possible third party libraries.

NOTE: GCFs currently only support pre-ES6 JS notation. That is, const, let, ()=>, ${}, etc, are NOT supported. If you have ES6+ code, you can use: https://babeljs.io/repl/ to transpile JS code.

Each function has its own directory which will be packaged and deployed. Each directory is also an NPM project, and will contain all dependencies.

Triggers

GCFs have multiple types of triggers.

Background

GCFs can be deployed as passive listeners, which listen for changes in a Google Cloud storage bucket. On a change, the bucket will be triggered, and information about the change passed into the function as context. see: https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/writing/background

HTTP

GCFs can also be deployed as highly abstracted NodeJS Express servers, which listen for HTTP requests with (req,res) notation. see: https://cloud.google.com/functions/docs/writing/http

Deployment and Testing

When you are ready to write a function, from a terminal do:

$ mkdir anyName
$ cd anyName
$ touch index.js     // must be 'index.js'
$ npm init
$ npm install {whatever you need}

Then, proceed to write your function in index.js. Be sure to encase it in an export. For example, if you are writing an HTTP function called myLittleFunction :

exports.myLittleFunction = function myLittleFunction(req,res) {
    // Function here
    res.status(200).send({Message:"eh-okay"});
}

When your function has been de-bugged, you can deploy it via Terminal from the CWD

// for HTTP functions
$ gcloud alpha functions deploy myLittleFunction --bucket {name of bucket} --trigger-http

Then, you can debug the live GCF via Terminal as well.

$ gcloud alpha functions call myLittleFunction --data '{"foo":"bar"}'