Cloud Functions template

22 Mar 2017

I’ve been using Google Cloud Functions a lot recently. I quickly realized, that I set up most of them in a pretty similar way. I figured that I could share that with other developers, to make it better and share the experiences. So, I distilled my template into a git repository, which is available here.

The template uses Gulp as a toolkit for automating tasks in Javascript projects. I picked it as it seems to get more steam than other similar solutions, like Grunt. In case you haven’t that installed in your system, before you continue you need to install Gulp with two commands:

$ npm install gulp-cli -g
$ npm install gulp -D

Once you have it done, you can start using the template. Probably the easiest way to do that is to download and unzip it from GitHub. This way you get raw files, without playing with git remotes and such. Remember to update README file and package.json to include information about your function. After you do that, you can install the local packages with:

$ npm install

Now, what does the template provide? Not much for now, to be honest. The first problem I was trying to solve was the tricky deployment of Cloud Functions. The thing is, when you deploy from your root repository, there is no easy way of ignoring the node_modules directory, which includes all the dependencies your code use. What you can do, is use a --include-node-modules, but I don’t really want to push my local modules to staging bucket, as they probably contain some development dependencies or some old modules. I would rather just have Google Cloud Functions install them on its own. What I came up with, is copying all the Javascript files and package.json to a separate directory, and deploy it from there. To do that, just run

$ gulp dist

This will do exactly what I described above, with the addition of running tests before. Ah, tests! I hated not having tests for my Cloud Functions, especially when it’s so easy to create a stub in Javascript. So, my template also has tests configured, using Mocha. There is even an example, so you can start writing tests immediately. In order to run the test suites only, just run:

$ gulp test

These are all the features for now. I could probably add some minifier, linter and other stuff, but I think this is still good place to start. I haven’t tested the template with solutions that utilize multiple Javascript files, I will certainly update that as soon as I know what I want to achieve. Let me know if you are, or planning to use the template, and let me know if there are any improvements you would need!