Learn Puppeteer, Redux-observable and Sequelize

OpenGraph images are the images you see when you paste a link into a social platform and it "unfurls" into an image, title, and description. This happens on Twitter, Discord, Slack, and many other platforms. This collection goes over everything from designing OpenGraph images in Figma, to implementing them in CodeSandbox, to returning headless browser screenshots from Netlify Functions, and finally using Cloudinary as a write-through cache. 

You will come away from this collection with the ability to ship an API that you can use on any of your sites, and also on-demand, that can generate images for not only OpenGraph unfurls, but also for Instagram, GitHub, and more. Using headless browsers with playwright to generate our images means we get full access to all the responsive power of CSS and all the logical power of JS to handle layout, importing assets like pngs, choosing different fonts, and more.

The image below is generated via the project you'll build and deploy in this course

![An example opengraph image](https://relaxed-payne-d1bfbe.netlify.com/opengraph?title=Building%20an%20OpenGraph%20image%20generation%20API%20with%20Cloudinary%20Netlify%20Functions%20and%20React&tags=figma,netlify%20functions,playwright&author=chrisbiscardi)

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

Building an OpenGraph image generation API with Cloudinary, Netlify Functions, and React

Handling async actions that affect your application’s state sounds like a tall order, but Redux makes it possible — and a win-win for you and your app’s users.

In this course, we will begin with nothing more than an empty directory and a text editor. Through small, focused lessons, we’ll learn how to set up a React project that uses Redux for state management and redux-observable for asynchronous actions. We’ll see how ‘epics’ are registered and how they each receive a ‘stream’ of actions from the store.

With an understanding of how things work, we’ll move onto solving common problems like: 
- Ajax cancellation
- creating sequences of async actions
- enabling code reuse through higher-order Observables 
- and much more.

RxJS 5-based middleware for Redux. Compose and cancel async actions to create side effects and more.

redux-observable

Asynchronous State Management with redux-observable v1

End-to-end testing assures you of a few things: that all the integrated pieces of an application properly function, all those pieces work together as expected, and your tests include and simulate real-user scenarios — something unit and integration tests just don't do.

This course introduces you to two great tools for E2E testing: 

* Puppeteer opens and runs applications in a Chromium browser and performs the actions it's given.
* Jest asserts that the integrated pieces work as expected and that add-on libraries like Faker and pixelmatch take our tests to the next level.

Over 9 lessons, we will create common application features and use Puppeteer and Jest to run different types of tests against them. You'll get practice using these tools to render content, mimic user activity, automate tests, and measure the overall performance of your application.

jest

End to End Testing with Google's Puppeteer and Jest

***Note: RxJS imports have changed since the publication of this course. Operators now must be passed into `.pipe` to be applied to an observable.***

In this course we will begin with nothing more than an empty directory & a text editor. Through small, focussed lessons we’ll learn how to setup a React project that uses Redux for state management and redux-observable for asynchronous actions. We’ll see how ‘epics’ are registered and how they each receive a ‘stream’ of actions from the store. 

With an understanding of how things work, we’ll move onto solving common problems such as Ajax cancellation, creating sequences of async actions, enabling code reuse through higher-order Observables and much more. 

## **UPDATE:** 
This course is outdated, view updated material here: [Asynchronous State Management with redux-observable v1](https://egghead.io/courses/asynchronous-state-management-with-redux-observable-v1)

Up and Running with redux-observable

Puppeteer is a Node library which provides a high-level API to control headless Chrome or Chromium over the DevTools Protocol. It can also be configured to use full (non-headless) Chrome or Chromium.

puppeteer

When taking screenshots, it's important that the browser is big enough to show all of the content in the DOM that we want to screenshot. We can do this by setting the viewport.

Setting the viewport on a Playwright headless browser

In this lesson we’ll learn exactly what’s needed to incorporate redux-observable into an existing React/Redux application. We’ll learn what ‘Epics’ are, and how they receive a stream of actions and return a stream of actions. In-between is where we get to apply side-effects, call out to external services etc etc. In this lesson we’ll demonstrate the ‘async’ nature of epics by responding to an action with another, delay action.

Add redux-observable to an existing Redux project

Redux is a predictable state container for JavaScript apps.
It helps you write applications that behave consistently, run in different environments (client, server, and native), and are easy to test.

redux

In this lesson we’ll learn how to perform an Ajax request to an external API in response to an action in the redux store. We’ll see how, within the epic, we get access to actions after any reducers have been executed and how we can convert that incoming action into a resulting one that will save the data received into the redux store.

Use redux-observable for simple Ajax requests

With redux-observable, we have the power of RxJS at our disposal - this means tasks that would otherwise be complicated and imperative, become simple and declarative. In this lesson we’ll respond to an action by queuing up 2 separate Ajax requests that will execute sequentially. Then we’ll group the results from both into an array and produce a single action from our epic that will save the data into the redux store

Create a queue of Ajax requests with redux-observable and group the results.

When accepting user input and converting it into a request that talks to the outside world, we can often end up in a situation where responses are no longer relevant. This is a common case in type-ahead style input fields - we would only want to call an external search API after the user has stopped typing for a short amount of time. In this lesson we’ll see how we can begin to combine RxJS operators to solve such problems. 

Debounce user input to avoid repeated Ajax requests

Any application that uses external services such as APIs should be able to handle errors gracefully. Often this requires no more that displaying a message to the user and ensuring the application continues to function. In this lesson we’ll look at how we can convert an error from the network into an action that is dispatched into the Redux store, allowing us to show an error message to the user and prevent the application from crashing.

Handle network errors gracefully

Although ‘epics’ in RxJS are often described as ‘actions in, actions out’, there may be times when you need to ‘bail out’ of an action, or to just ignore the current one given some condition. By learning about RxJS’s `filter` Operator, we’ll see how easy it is to do ‘nothing’ when you need to. We’ll also see how the composition techniques available in RXJS allow us to control the UI in a declarative manner.

Filter a stream to exclude empty values

In certain situations, you care more about the final state of the redux store than you do about the particular stream of events coming out of an epic. In this lesson we explore a technique for dispatching actions direction into the store, having the epic execute as they would normally in production, and then assert on the updated store’s state.

Use tests to verify updates to the Redux store

Sequelize is a promise-based ORM for Node.js and io.js. It supports the dialects PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite and MSSQL and features solid transaction support, relations, read replication and more.

sequelize

Sequelize attribute getters and setters are a convenient way to encapsulate extra logic for model properties. In this video, we'll cover adding getters and setters to enhance and even virtualize a column.

Sequelize: Getters, Setters and Virtual Columns

Models in the Node.js ORM, Sequelize, can be expanded with both class level and instance level functions. This video will show you how to extend your models to add helpers or business logic, and explain the methods execution scope.

Sequelize: Class & Instance Methods

Javascript and database systems tend to be at odds with regard to how tables and columns should be named. Sequlize provides all the tools necessary to satisfy naming conventions in both your Node.js code and in your SQL database.

Sequelize: Model & Column Casing

In this lesson we are going to set up our basic app, set our environment variables, define our targeted viewport, and install Jest, Puppeteer, and Faker. We'll use these features to write our end to end tests. 

Setup and Install Dependencies for Testing with Google's Puppeteer

Now that we have our setup and environment ready for using Puppeteer to test our create-react-app, we can write our first tests. We will test our h1 and navigation, to make sure that they load correctly. In this lesson, we will be able to watch puppeteer open up a browser and evaluate our tests in real time. 

Test HTML Content on a Webpage with Puppeteer

In this lesson we are going to test a form submission by replicating keyboard input, mouse clicks, and touchscreen events. This will be done with random user information generated by Faker. We will test this in different contexts, including an iPhone 6 environment.

Replicate User Activity with Faker and Puppeteer

In this lesson we are going to test that a cookie is saved to the document whenever our login form is submitted. Then we will also learn how to set cookies from within our tests. 

Work with Document Cookies in Tests with Puppeteer

In this lesson we are going to write two tests that check our application for any console logs an page errors. We will also learn how we can log these out to our terminal. 

Check for Console Logs and Exceptions with Puppeteer

In this lesson we are going to take a screenshot and a pdf of our application. We'll add this to conditionally run when one of our tests fail. This way we can see what our test was seeing when it failed. These screenshots can help debug why tests fail. 

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