 Courses from Jason Lengstorf

An all-in-one workflow that combines global deployment, continuous integration, and automatic HTTPS.

netlify

In this lesson, you'll learn how to set up a new Vite project and configure it to use React with TypeScript.

Set up a Vite project with React and TypeScript

In this lesson, you'll globally install the Netlify CLI and use its dev command to run your site locally. Netlify automatically detects if it's a Vite project!

Set up Vite local dev with the Netlify CLI

React is one of the web’s most popular frameworks for building JavaScript applications. 

If you know what you’re doing, React can drastically simplify how you build, use, and maintain code.

Whether you’re a React newbie or you’re ready for advanced techniques, you can level-up with egghead. Explore our in-depth courses, lessons, and community resources to build more powerful applications and crack open your career.

react

Netlify has the power to automatically detect serverless functions in your project and run a functions server with hot reloading for you. 

In this lesson, you'll learn how to create serverless functions in your Netlify app using TypeScript

Add TypeScript powered serverless functions to a Netlify project

Learn how to create a form with controlled inputs using React hooks.

If you'd like to learn more about CSS Modules [check out the docs on Github](https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules)

Create a form with React hooks

In this lesson, you will learn how to create a Netlify serverless function, powered by TypeScript, to handle form submissions.

Create a serverless form submission handler with TypeScript

In this lesson, you'll learn how to set up a submit handler that posts your form data to a serverless function.

Submit form data to a Netlify serverless function

After all your hard work, it's time to deploy your app! 

In this lesson, you will learn how to get your project onto GitHub and deploy it using Netlify

Deploy a Vite project with the Netlify CLI

Starting from a prebuilt frontend, Jason Lengstorf guides you through the creation of a "Corgi Up-boop App" that uses Netlify Functions and Hasura. You can view [the deployed final product on Netlify](https://egghead-serverless-functions.netlify.app/).

You'll set up the Netlify CLI, and configure a local development environment before writing and deploying functions with a few different use cases.

The first example function bypasses CORS restrictions to retrieve corgi data from an example third-party API.

Next, you'll configure environmental variables to securely communicate with the Unsplash API without exposing private keys to the client.

Serverless functions don't persist data by themselves, so we will use  Hasura to create a GraphQL API for tracking the number of "boops" each corgi receives.

This course is an excellent illustration of the speed of Serverless functions, and how fast you can implement functionality in your web applications.

Build a Corgi Up-boop Web App with Netlify Serverless Functions and Hasura

In this course, we've built and deployed a serverless application that loads data, combines data, uses environment variables safely, protects API keys, works around CORS, and utilizes data from a database. We additionally, deployed our application using Netlify's continuous deployment process. 

With continuous deployment, Netlify will automatically deploy new versions of our site when pushing commits to the connected Git repository. This also facilitates features like Deploy Previews, branch deploys, and split testing.

The live website to the course project can be found here: https://suspicious-banach-da7b44.netlify.app/

Deploy a Static Application to Production on Netlify

We'll update our boops count by utilizing the `update_boops_by_pk`, an auto-generated query provided by Hasura. 

We'll create a new serverless function called `add-boop.js` that takes events and arguments provided by the `UpdateBoopCount` mutation. 

We can increment and store the boop count by making a request with the `handleBoop` function.

As UX improvements, the button is disabled and enabled when the increment boop function is being called. The button text updates to match the current state.

Update Data in Database Triggered by Client Interactions with Netlify Serverless Functions

We'll create a helper function to send GraphQL requests to Hasura from our serverless 
functions using `node-fetch` and passing the `X-Hasura-Admin-Secret` in the header of the request. 

Hasura is configured with an admin password that we set in the previous lesson. When making an API request the client passes the admin password in the header `X-Hasura-Admin-Secret`. Then Hasura validates the admin secret and allows access to *all* resources.

The secret is called `admin-secret` since the `admin` ****role is used to execute the request i.e the caller will have permissions to create/update/delete/view any data that is there.

Send GraphQL Requests to Hasura from Netlify Serverless Functions using node-fetch

We'll load existing data from our Hasura database using serverless functions. The first step will be to create a new mutation in the Hasura GraphiQL named  `InserOrUpdateBoops.`

We need to make sure that all the corgis are being loaded into our database. Once they are loaded, we can set the count to zero. We do this by defining a GraphQL mutation using an autogenerated variable provided by Hasura called, `boops_insert_input!`. 

Our application loads the existing data but the functionality to save the values from the client-side is still not available.

Load Existing Data from a Hasura Database using Netlify Serverless Functions

PostgreSQL is a powerful, open source object-relational database system.

postgres

We'll store client interaction using Hasura as our primary database. Hasura allows you to build a powerful, secure & flexible GraphQL API that can query data in your databases, HTTP services, serverless functions, as well as third party APIs. 

We'll start by creating a Hasura Cloud account. Proceed to create a Postgres database on Heroku. If you don’t have an account on Heroku, you need to sign up on Heroku. You won’t need a credit card. 

We'll add corgi data to the database using the Unsplash `ID` as our primary key, and `count` as an integer for our count functionality.

Create a Database using Hasura Cloud and a Postgres Instance to Store Data

We'll a single set of data using a serverless function and multiple APIs. We already have our API for pulling the corgi's data, the next step is getting the images from Unsplash using the Unsplash API. 

To access the Unsplash API, create an account. Once your account has been registered for the API, go to your apps. Click “New Application”, and fill in the required details. To use the API you must abide by the terms and follow the API guidelines. 

The API is available at [https://api.unsplash.com/](https://api.unsplash.com/). Responses are sent as JSON.

The collection we'll be loading is available at [api.unsplash.com/collections/48405776/photos](http://api.unsplash.com/collections/48405776/photos) You'll need your own API key!

Serverless functions help us comply with the terms and API guidelines by protecting API keys and making secure calls to 3rd Party APIs.

Load Data Using Secure API Keys from a Third-Party API with Netlify Serverless Functions

Environment variables set in a `.env` file can be imported using the Netlify CLI with the following command: `netlify env:import`.

This allows you to manage environment variables directly on Netlify, providing the benefit of security and flexibility of sharing environment variables with your team. 

From inside Netlify, you can access the environment variables in:

`Site settings` > `Build & deploy` > `Environment` > `Environment variables`

Import and Set Environment Variables from a .env file using Netlify CLI

CORS limits websites from communicating with other domains without the full consent of both sites. Consuming data from a 3rd Party REST API makes it difficult since we can't properly configure the appropriate CORS headers. To solve this, we'll set up a proxy server to request the data using a Netlify function that avoids CORS altogether.

The Third-Party API that we'll be working with will provide the following data: `id`, `name`, `favoriteSong` for each corgi. 

[http://no-cors-api.netlify.app/api/corgis](http://no-cors-api.netlify.app/api/corgis)

We will also use `node-fetch` a light-weight module that brings the `fetch` API to fetch the data into our application.

Circumvent CORS when Accessing a Third-Party API using Netlify Functions 

There are a few ways you can run Netlify serverless functions while you are developing them. 

You can: 

- Navigate to the directory under the `/.netlify/functions/` path
- Curl them using the full URL
- Use an app like Postman

Manually Trigger Netlify Serverless Functions Locally

Netlify makes deploying to production a breeze by configuring your Netlify CLI to your Netlify account and integrating with GitHub.

We'll log in to Netlify through the CLI and initialize a site by completing all the options that the CLI runs us through. Once this is done, Netlify will trigger new builds for your site every time you push to GitHub.

Deploy Serverless Functions to Production on Netlify using the Netlify CLI

Netlify makes developing serverless functions easy with the netlify-cli (`ntl` for short). You'll be able to build and test functions locally as well as publish your functions from the CLI. 

We will install netlify-cli globally and create a `netlify.toml` file that will configure where the CLI should look to run functions that we define, in our case `functions/`. When the application is served up, Netlify runs functions under `/.netlify/functions/`.

Set up a Local Development Environment for Serverless Functions Using Netlify

JavaScript® (often shortened to JS) is a lightweight, interpreted, object-oriented language with first-class functions, most known as the scripting language for Web pages, but used in many non-browser environments as well such as node.js or Apache CouchDB. It is a prototype-based, multi-paradigm scripting language that is dynamic, and supports object-oriented, imperative, and functional programming styles.

javascript

Clone the course repository at: [https://github.com/learnwithjason/serverless-functions](https://github.com/learnwithjason/serverless-functions). In the repo, you'll want to start with the `start` branch. 

Preact is a JavaScript library that describes itself as a fast 3kB alternative to React with the same ES6 API. This is not a course on Preact. For this course, we'll be adding serverless functionality to a predefined Preact application in your local development environment. The Preact app contains static HTML and hardcoded data to get us started quickly.

To run this application in your local development, execute the following command: `npm run dev.` That will open `localhost:5000`. You can interact with this application, but for the moment, the data is not persistent.


Set up a Preact Project in a Local Development Environment

A serverless function is something that is going to allow us to do server-like things without having to manage servers, but an important distinction here is that serverless does not mean that there are **no** servers. 

The environment is actually running on top of an operating system and uses physical servers, but the responsibility for provisioning and managing the infrastructure belongs entirely to the service provider.

Some of the benefits of using serverless functions: 

- **Enhanced scalability.** No need for developers to implement code to scale. It scales automatically.
- **Reduced time to market.** Serverless is an optimized set of tools for building quickly.
- **No boiler code.** A serverless function is just a tiny piece of logic. Reducing the complexity of software.
- **More time for user experience.** Serverless functions allow teams to focus resources on the user experience and not on managing servers.
- **Security.** We can call third-party APIs securely without exposing important data on the client-side.

What Are Serverless Functions?

When comparing two visually similar websites, it can often be challenging to precisely identify the subtle differences between them. To facilitate a rapid analysis of these discrepancies, a practical technique involves leveraging Chrome's integrated developer tools to capture full-page screenshots of each site. Subsequently, these screenshots can be uploaded to a platform like AI Studio. There, the AI can analyze the images and generate a report detailing the variations. This entire process, leveraging a few quick shortcuts, can be completed in under a minute, delivering a comprehensive breakdown of the differences for efficient comparison and analysis.

Quickly Compare Two Sites Using AI Studio with Chrome Full Page Screenshots

It's fairly trivial to create a React project, but there's always a big hurdle between creating it locally and making it shareable so that someone else can run it. This lesson walks you through the process of automating creating a React project locally, creating the repository where it's going to be hosted, and creating shareable links where it can be run so that you can quickly and easily create single one-off demos and shoot them over to your friends and coworkers for sharing your code ideas in a working environment.


```bash
share-react-project() {
  if [[ -z "$1" ]]; then
    echo "Usage: share-react-project <project_name>"
    return 1
  fi

  local project_name="$1"
  local github_username=$(gh api /user --jq '.login')

  echo "Creating Vite project: $project_name"
  pnpm create vite "$project_name" --template react

  cd "$project_name"

  echo "Initializing Git repository"
  git init

  echo "Adding all files to Git"
  git add .

  echo "Creating initial commit"
  git commit -m "Initial commit"

  local codesandbox_link="https://codesandbox.io/p/github/${github_username}/${project_name}"

  echo "Adding CodeSandbox link to README.md"
  echo "" >> README.md
  echo "## CodeSandbox" >> README.md
  echo "[![Open in CodeSandbox](https://assets.codesandbox.io/github/button-edit-blue.svg)](${codesandbox_link})" >> README.md

  echo "Adding README.md to Git"
  git add README.md

  echo "Committing README.md changes"
  git commit -m "Add CodeSandbox link"

  echo "Creating GitHub repository: $github_username/$project_name"
  gh repo create "$github_username/$project_name" --public

  echo "Pushing to remote 'origin'"
  git push -u origin main

  echo "Project '$project_name' created successfully!"
  echo "GitHub repository: https://github.com/$github_username/$project_name"
  echo "CodeSandbox link: $codesandbox_link"
}
```

Automate Creating a Local React Project, GitHub Repository, and Live Hosted Demo in a Single Command

[Verdaccio](https://verdaccio.org/) is a fully featured NPM registry that you can run locally on your machine. It’s a great tool for testing your release process, running end-to-end tests, and simulating real-world scenarios like deploying packages, installing them, and verifying functionality as an end user would.

Nx includes a [generator](https://nx.dev/features/generate-code) that simplifies setting up Verdaccio. To configure it, run:

```shell
npx nx g @nx/js:setup-verdaccio   
```

This command installs the necessary NPM packages and creates a `project.json` file with a `local-registry` target. To start the local registry, open a new terminal window and run:

```shell
npx nx local-registry
```

This will:
- Launch the Verdaccio registry.
- Configure NPM to point to the local Verdaccio server at `http://localhost:4873`.

> **Note:** A `project.json` file provides an advanced way to define scripts, offering more flexibility than a traditional `package.json` for managing complex targets.

Setup local Verdaccio server to release NPM packages

Learn how to spin up a local NPM registry powered by Verdaccio to test deploy your NPM packages.

In TypeScript, developers often begin by defining the structure of their data using type definitions or interfaces, which is a powerful way to ensure type safety. However, as applications grow and become more complex, simply defining the shape of an object might not be enough to guarantee its consistent creation and behavior throughout the codebase. This often leads to situations where objects that are intended to be of a certain "type" might be missing crucial properties or have incorrect data, which can be difficult to track down and debug.

This lesson tackles the question of when and why to move beyond basic type definitions and embrace classes in TypeScript. It demonstrates how classes provide a more robust mechanism for defining object structure, enforcing type constraints, and ensuring consistent object creation. By establishing a clear blueprint for objects, classes not only improve compile-time type safety but also offer runtime benefits and better code organization, ultimately helping developers avoid common pitfalls associated with loosely structured objects in larger TypeScript projects.

Stop Avoiding Classes in TypeScript

Karabiner isn't only for your keyboard. It can also hijack your mouse buttons and enable them to be similar to layers on your keyboard, where holding down a mouse button can allow you to tap keys on your keyboard to trigger commands and macros that can completely revolutionize your workflows. For example, you can hold down the right mouse button and tap on R to go to references in VS Code. Or hold down the right mouse button and tap the left mouse button to chop up videos and Screenflow.

This completely unlocks a whole new world of possibilities and use cases for your mouse as you can hover your mouse over anywhere on the page. And just tapping keys on your keyboard allows you to trigger mouse actions, to trigger keyboard actions, or to trigger macros and applications and terminal commands. and anything that your imagination can come up with. 

Karabiner: Rethinking Right-Click as a Macro Command Center

Make an HTML table more readable on mobile devices by using the ::before pseudo-element. We add labels to each cell, so they appear like cards when the table is viewed on smaller screens. The ::before content is set using a data-label attribute for each cell to enhance mobile viewability without horizontal scrolling.



Create a mobile friendly table with the before pseudo-element

Learn to use CSS ::before pseudo-element for mobile-friendly HTML tables. Add labels to cells for enhanced readability on mobile, avoiding horizontal scroll.

Any app of a decent size has event flows and messages being passed around. At a certain point it becomes complicated to explain it through prose and you want to turn towards diagrams. Now setting aside the time to create diagrams that accurately describe what's happening in your codebase can be quite time consuming. Luckily, with today's AI tools, we can now just do basic walkthroughs with rough recordings over codebase dictating what's going on along the way and then upload that to tools like AI Studio and then ask it to generate diagrams in a text-based format such as Mermaid that will then generate the flowcharts and diagrams for us. So this video walks us through this process of recording a rough video, uploading it to AI Studio and then asking AI Studio to generate the proper Mermaid diagram syntax.

Generate Mermaid Flow Chart Diagrams with Gemini 2.0 from Rough Screen Recordings

I'm a diehard Karabiner user and anytime I start doing something repetitively I always move it into my Karabiner configuration. Sometimes I'll fall into scenarios where I want to trigger a command, but I also want to know if that command succeeded or failed. Since Karabiner can trigger any command, setting up the command is fairly straightforward, but knowing whether it succeeded or failed became much more difficult. Luckily for me there is a package called terminal-notifier that you can install from homebrew and you can pipe the output of your command to terminal-notifier. And have a seamless way of triggering your keyboard shortcut which runs a command and you can be notified of the results.

Use Karabiner to Trigger a Terminal Command and Get Notified of the Results

There are a lot of scenarios when inspecting a site in Chrome where you don't want any click events to fire and you don't want any scripts to run. Or maybe something is animating in and out of the page and you want to capture it at a certain moment. This is a great use case for pausing script execution, which is kind of using the debugger manually by going into the Chrome DevTools and the Sources tab and clicking the pause button to essentially pause the entire page. This will give you a chance to inspect any of the elements and styles you want to inspect. And you don't have to worry about fire and click events or anything that might interrupt your investigation into the elements and styles that you want to find.

Pause Script Execution in Chrome to Easily Inspect Elements

Gemini 2.0 has a context window of a million tokens, and this means that you can upload hundreds of files and allow it to inspect and analyze massive refactors across entire code bases. 

This lesson demonstrates concatenating an entire code base into a single file and then uploading it to AI Studio. Once within AI Studio, we ask it to find the types of tasks that it can evaluate for us. Then we select one of the tasks and ask it to generate instructions for that task. Once those instructions are complete, we then turn them over to Windsurf's Cascade agent, and we allow Windsurf's Cascade to do all of the work for us as we sit back, relax, and let the AI do our jobs.

Jason Lengstorf

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