Learn Grunt, Most and Serverless

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.

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

netlify

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

Create a serverless application and deploy it in under thirty minutes!

We'll be using Netlify, Vite, TypeScript, and React in our project. This stack synergizes extremely well for rapidly developing professional-quality applications. 

If you haven't heard of Vite, it's the French word for quick! It's also a build tool that consists of a dev-server and an extremely fast bundler. It makes for a rapid development loop.

As for the rest. Netlify makes hosting fast and easy with serverless functions and continuous deployment. React enables you to quickly create reusable components. And TypeScript helps you write cleaner code that is easier to refactor. 

So get started and learn how to use this stack in your own applications!

Create a TypeScript powered serverless React application

Most.js is a toolkit for reactive programming. It helps you compose asynchronous operations on streams of values and events, e.g. WebSocket messages, DOM events, etc, and on time-varying values, e.g. the "current value" of an <input>, without many of the hazards of side effects and mutable shared state.

most

Most provides many means for creating streams, the simplest of which is the `of` function. In this lesson, we demonstrate the use of `of` to lift a single value into a stream. We also show off the `just` alias of `of`, as well as, a common method for currying a function.


Create Streams From Single Values With Most.js

AngularJS is an open-source JavaScript framework, maintained by Google, that assists with running single-page applications. Its goal is to augment web-based applications with model–view–controller (MVC) capability, in an effort to make both development and testing easier.

angularjs

Task automation is critical for any AngularJS single-page application. Grunt gets the job done.

Introduction to Grunt for Angular

One of the more powerful functions for creating streams in MostJS is the `from` function.

In this lesson, we use `from` to create streams from various Javascript Iterables, take a look at how to throw generator functions into the mix and, for good measure, take a sneak peek at how we can limit our streams using a function called `take`.

As a bonus, we see what it looks like to use `Function.prototype.bind` for a quick and dirty way to partially apply arguments to a function.

Create Streams From Iterables With Most.js

grunt

GruntJS allows you to use underscore/erb style templates to reduce repetition and create variables. This is commonly used to point at build folders and files within your application's structure.

Template

In this lesson John will show you how to start using Grunt Uglify to compress your javascript for production deployment.

Uglify

Grunt Multitask allows you to write complex tasks that run multiple targets. In this lesson, John will show you how to use Multitask in your GruntJS builds.

Multitask

You can use Grunt to combine all of your Javascript files into a single concatenated file.

Concatenating Your Javascript with grunt-contrib-concat

For production we want to use minified javascript to reduce the payload that is sent from the server. This can easily be accomplished with grunt-uglify.

Minifying your output with grunt-uglify

In this lesson John will show you how to get started with grunt-contrib-watch. Watch is an essential component of any Grunt build, and you will find yourself using it in almost every project. 

Grunt Watch

Grunt will clean up your build with the grunt-contrib-clean to make sure that no artifacts from previous builds are hanging around.

Cleaning your build folder with grunt-contrib-clean

With Grunt you can automate core tasks for your AngularJS project. In this lesson we will take a look at converting Stylus files to CSS, and add a watch task to convert those files automatically whenever a change is detected.

Development Automation Tasks with Grunt

Build and watch ECMAscript 6 using traceur compiler and Grunt.

traceur compiler and Grunt

In this lesson John will show you how to create a simple external config file for your GruntJS build.

External Config

Unlike RxJS, Most does not include an observable-based AJAX helper utility. However, it can be very convenient to have one, because it allows you to use streams to do things like declaratively handling errors & setting up cancellation. In this lesson, we use currying & functional composition to create an Observable-based wrapper around the fetch API with Ramda & Most.

Create an Observable-Based Fetch Wrapper Using Ramda & Most

Lightweight yet powerful IDE, perfectly equipped for complex client-side development and server-side development with Node.js.

webstorm

In this lesson you will install GruntJS and get up and running with your first task, initial configuration, and how to get Grunt methods auto-completing in WebStorm.

Introduction to Grunt

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 

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

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

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.