Learn Cloudflare, Nginx and Xstream

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

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

Cycle.js is a framework where your app is described as a simple function taking an event stream as input and outputting an event stream.

cycle

This lesson is the first in an introduction to Cycle.js. We will see how to build from scratch a toy version of Cycle.js. See how to use RxJS to create simple web apps, and how to separate logic from effects.

Separate Logic from Effects in Cycle.js

Docker containers wrap a piece of software in a complete filesystem that contains everything needed to run: code, runtime, system tools, system libraries – anything that can be installed on a server. This guarantees that the software will always run the same, regardless of its environment.

docker

Learn about the concepts of managing data within Docker volumes, including all of the commands to create and manage volumes. We'll demonstrate how to mount a Docker volume to one or many containers by creating and mounting a volume to an Nginx proxy, and then verify the output with curl. You'll also see how changes to files within volumes of one container propagate to other containers with the same volume mounted, and learn various commands to inspect Docker volumes.

Manage Data within Docker Volumes

Learn how to setup an Nginx proxy server with Docker that sits in front of a Node.js app. You can use a proxy to control the flow of frontend requests hitting your app, as well as to achieve better performance and scalability. We'll create a sample Node.js app, configure a default Nginx configuration file for proxying web requests, build both Node.js and Nginx Docker images, and learn how to link everything up and get it running with Docker specifics.

Setup an Nginx Proxy for a Node.js App with Docker

Node.js apps built with Docker cannot scale horizontally by themselves. In this lesson we will spawn out multiple Node.js processes/containers, and move the incoming request handler to an Nginx proxy to load balance and properly scale our Node.js app.

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