Learn Cloudflare, Npm and Webstorm

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

You can’t be everywhere at once. Neither can node packages. But with a utility called npx — included in npm v5.2 and later — you can interact and run with node modules even if they’re not downloaded locally. The same is true for gists and remote branches of GitHub. As long as npm installed, your work can be wherever you are.

This course from Elijah Manor unlocks the power of the npx utility. Over 17 minutes, we will examine the npx package runner and look through various scenarios where the tool is helpful when running node packages from the command line. You’ll learn to use npm to:

- test out various versions of a package
- run packages without globally installing
- run code directly from GitHub
- make working with packages much easier

npm is the package manager for JavaScript. Find, share, and reuse packages of code from hundreds of thousands of developers — and assemble them in powerful new ways.

Execute npm Package Binaries with the npx Package Runner

npm is like a giant library of code building blocks. There are tons of these “blocks”, aka “packages” that we can compose together to build cool things. We can use packages by other developers, but we can also write and publish our own. 

In this course we will learn how to create, publish, and update our own packages. We will create a JavaScript utility module to filter out sensitive words from a string, including tests and development file watching. We will then cover publishing and updating our package. This same approach can be used to create and publish other types of packages too like components (React, Angular, Web Components etc.) and command line interfaces.

Publish JavaScript packages on npm

In this course we will introduce the topic of using npm scripts as a build tool. We will start simple and then continue to build a small website as we introduce new topics. By the end of the course, you'll know how to get started and what tools and techniques are needed for you to create your own set of build scripts.

How to Use npm Scripts as Your Build Tool

The ability to pull in just about anything your project needs from npm is amazing, but it can also lead to bundle bloat if you aren't selective about what libraries you pull into your library. In this lesson, we'll take a look at bundlephobia.com, a tool that provides insights about a library's size. With bundlephobia, you can make informed decisions about what libraries you pull into your project and avoid unnecessary bundle bloat.

https://bundlephobia.com/

Make informed decisions about 3rd party npm libraries with bundlephobia

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

With Node.js installed, bootstrapping a react app is as simple as executing `create-react-app` with `npx`. No further downloads necessary.

Bootstrap a react app using create-react-app

Leaflet is the leading open-source JavaScript library for mobile-friendly interactive maps. Weighing just about 38 KB of JS, it has all the mapping features most developers ever need.

leaflet

While there are a few options for building maps, [Leaflet](https://leafletjs.com/) is the most popular. Lucky for us, Leaflet is also available as a ReactJS component library with [React Leaflet](https://react-leaflet.js.org/). We'll use both Leaflet and React Leaflet to build a map in our React app.

To get started, we need to install:

[Leaflet (npmjs.com)](https://www.npmjs.com/package/leaflet) and [React Leaflet (npmjs.com)](https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-leaflet)

**[Click here for exercise instructions](https://github.com/colbyfayock/launchtime-workshop/tree/master/lessons/02%20-%20Adding%20Your%20First%20React%20Leaflet%20Map%20to%20a%20New%20React%20Application#1-installing-our-dependencies)**


Install Leaflet and react-leaflet with NPM in a JavaScript Project

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

Nx has been design to work especially well in large monorepos. One particularity (compare to other monorepo solutions) is that Nx follows the principle of having one single version of a package in the entire workspace. That said, you'll have one version of React, one version of Angular etc.. This helps to keep things consistent, facilitates code sharing as well as easier migrations.
In this lesson we're looking into adding the [material-ui](https://material-ui.com/) package to our React app.

Install and use external npm packages in an Nx Workspace

Node.js is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.

node

Tests are really important in the software development cycle. But how we can test if our API - or even a page - will support the web traffic and requests our users will create by accessing them?

In this video, you will learn how to create HTTP load and benchmarking tests in Node.js using the autocannon package. With that, we can make sure our API is not consuming too much memory, CPU, or any other resource that can cause slow responses.

Create Load Tests in Node.js Using Autocannon

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

A lot of the power behind npm scripts is creating custom scripts that are outside the basic set that npm natively understands. In this lesson we will install the ESLint node package, create a new eslint npm script, briefly discuss about environment variables and how npm knows where to find your binary, and then execute our custom script from the command line.

Create a custom npm script

Often times you’ll have variations that you’ll want to make to your npm scripts and repeating yourself is inefficient and verbose. Instead you can create a base script and pass arguments into it from another script.

Pass arguments to npm scripts

In this lesson we will look at pulling out complex npm script logic into an external JavaScript file. Instead of writing bash scripts you can leverage your JavaScript abilities to automate your build process. We’ll use some helper node modules such as shelljs, opn-cli, and babel-cli. 

Create a node script to replace a complex npm script

In addition to package.json level variables (such as name and version), you can have custom conf settings that can be used in your npm scripts. These config values can be overridden outside of the package.json by using the npm config set command if necessary.

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