Learn Cloudflare, Grep and Jasmine

Cloudflare Workers is a serverless application platform that enables you to create and deploy functions to Cloudflare's Edge Network.

Unlike other serverless providers that only have regional data centers, Cloudflare's Edge Network consists of hundreds of servers all over the world.

Cloudflare Workers is a powerful platform, and this course serves as a great introduction for what it can do.

Follow along with Kristian Freeman as you build a localization engine that renders data based on the Edge location nearest to the application's user.

After this course, you'll be ready to start experimenting with your own Cloudflare Workers projects. *Need an idea?* *[Check out the suggested Portfolio Project for this course.](https://egghead.io/projects/introduction-to-cloudflare-workers)*

Cloudflare secures and ensures the reliability of your external-facing resources such as websites, APIs, and applications. It protects your internal resources such as behind-the-firewall applications, teams, and devices. And it is your platform for developing globally-scalable applications.

cloudflare

Introduction to Cloudflare Workers

CMD+F in your text editor can only get you so far! In this course, we will learn to use grep and find, two powerful command-line utilities, to search through and explore our codebase. Learn to search specific files and folders, using regular expressions to look for -- or ignore! -- particular phrases. We'll cover how to search recursively, get more context on your results, and some simple tricks to make your searches faster and more targeted.


Once you're familiar with grep and find, you'll be able to quickly answer questions such as: Do I use this function anywhere other than my tests? Where does this file get imported? Whether you're working on a new feature, reading a codebase for the first time, or refactoring existing code, grep and find can help you work faster and more effectively.

A Unix command used to search files for the occurrence of a string of characters that matches a specified pattern.

grep

Use Grep for Fast Search from the Command Line

When you have a bunch of text to sift through, standard Unix command line utilities like `grep`, `sed`, `awk`, `cut`, `sort`, and `uniq` can help extract the information you want. For example, with a git log for a project, you might want to group commits by day in order to see which days you're most productive, or find out how many commits you made last year. In this lesson, you'll learn how to combine these commands with the pipe operator to extract this data from git logs.

Analyze Git Logs with the Command Line

Using NPM, you can install Cloudflare Workers' CLI (command-line interface), Wrangler, by typing `npm install -g @cloudflare/wrangler` into your command line. Wrangler allows you to generate and publish Cloudflare Workers projects. We'll also use the `wrangler login` command which will give you a link to authorize Wrangler. This will set up an API token specifically for your Wrangler installation that will allow you to publish and read all the Workers and Workers KV information that you need.

Install and Configure the Cloudflare Workers CLI Wrangler

To deploy a Cloudflare Workers serverless function, you'll need to sign up for a free Cloudflare Workers account at [workers.cloudflare.com](http://workers.cloudflare.com/), and select your unique workers.dev subdomain to deploy your functions to.

Create a Cloudflare Workers Account

Wranglers generate command, `wrangler generate`, allows you to create new Cloudflare Workers projects. Using the URL parameter, you can also generate new projects based on Cloudflare's starter templates, or open-source projects created by other developers, but for now, you will just use the default. To do this you'll only need to give it a name, for example, `wrangler generate my-worker`,  this will create a new project called my-worker. 

Generate New Cloudflare Workers Projects with Wrangler's generate Command

We'll take a look at the default code in `index.js` in a Workers project. We'll take a second to understand how it works before building the rest of our project. 

First will see what our Worker looks like in an actual browser by running `wrangler preview`. In a terminal, and we'll check out how Serverless functions in Cloudflare Workers listen for HTTPS requests via the "fetch" event and respond to them by creating and returning a new Response.

Write Your First Cloudflare Workers Serverless Function

Using `wrangler whoami` in a terminal we'll grab our account id so we can paste our id into the double quotes of `account_id = ""`  inside of `wrangler.toml` file. Using the `wrangler dev` command we can look at our Workers serverless function and test it before deploying it. Once we're ready to deploy, we can use the `wrangler publish` command to deploy it to our unique workers.dev subdomain.

Preview and Publish Your Cloudflare Workers Project

By updating the response body and setting a corresponding Content-Type header, we can render HTML pages from directly inside of our Cloudflare Workers function.

We will update our Cloudflare Worker to return a call to a template function that we define. That template function returns a string of HTML that we will render in the browser.

Render HTML Pages with Cloudflare Workers

Up until now, we've been rendering plain responses, not based on any information coming in with a request. The request.cf object sent with every incoming HTTP request to a Workers function has a ton of interesting information, including the regionality of the request, and which Cloudflare data center is responding to the request. Using this information, we'll render a dynamic HTML page based on where the user visiting our site is in the world.

Render Cloudflare Region Data for a Request Using request.cf

Deploying to your unique workers.dev subdomain is a great way to test your serverless functions before they're ready to go to production. Once you are ready to deploy to production, you can use Wrangler's environment feature to deploy to your zone, or Cloudflare-managed domain, by providing the "-e" (environment) flag when publishing.

You can check this worker out [here](https://hello-world-worker.signalnerve.com/).

Deploy to a Custom Domain with Cloudflare Wrangler Environments

Sometimes you'll be looking for a string, but won't know which file it's in; or you'll want to find all usages of it within a directory. Learn how to use grep -r to recursively search all the files in a directory. 

Search directory contents recursively using grep

Learn how to use find to identify filenames matching specified patterns. We'll use find to identify all .jsx files in a directory, or all test files in a directory.

Use find to search for filename patterns

Learn to use git grep to only search through the tracked files in a git repo. This is especially useful when you want to exclude build artifacts or locally installed dependencies, such as webpack bundles or the node_modules directory. You'll also note that git grep is automatically colorized - we'll see how to get the same coloring effect with grep --color.

Search the contents of a git repository with git grep

By default, grep displays the file path and the line where a match is found. Learn to use the flags -A, -B, -C, and -n to get more context, and view line numbers as well as the lines surrounding a pattern match.


Show context around matches using grep

By using wildcards and glob patterns with the special characters . and *, you can create regular expressions that describe what kind of text you're looking for, instead of just plaintext strings. 

Search for basic patterns using grep

Learn to use grep's extended regular expressions to describe more complex patterns. The `?` and `+` special characters describe optional patterns. The `?` character matches zero or one instance of the preceding term, and the `+` character matches one or more instances of the preceding term. To use these characters, you'll need to either escape them with backslashes or turn on extended regular expressions with the `-E` flag.

Use grep's extended regular expressions to find complex patterns

Learn to use the special anchor characters `^` and `$` to indicate the beginning and end of lines when writing regular expressions for grep. These line anchors are part of basic regular expressions in grep, so you don't need to escape them.

Specify line beginning and end in patterns using grep

You can describe classes of characters using bracket expressions. We'll use expressions such as [a-zA-Z] and [0-9] to search for alphabetic and numeric characters with grep.

Match classes of characters using bracket expressions with grep

Describe optional patterns with grep OR using the vertical bar character `|`. By using the `|` special character, you can write either-or style patterns. In this lesson we'll look for matches on "grey" or "gray". Like the `+` and `?` characters, the `|` character is part of extended regular expressions with grep, so you'll either need to escape it with a backslash, or use the -E flag.

Search for optional patterns with grep OR

By grouping your searches with parentheses, you can create even more complex searches. Grouping lets you separate out different parts of your regular expression, and apply special characters like +, ?, and * to groups of search terms.

Topics

Instructors

Content Type