A simple workflow for the Webtask CLI

Assuming you already know and have a Webtask account:

npm i -g wt-cli
npm i -g wtw
wtw --help
wt init

This last command will go trough the account setup to use the remote runtimes provided by webtask.io

Now, let’s create a remote webtask from an existing file (wraps ‘wt create’):

wtw create myfile.js

You can read about motivations and general conventions

Obviously, Webtask is required. The setup takes 1 minute
Create an account and a install a CLI with npm following this instructions

Once the basic environment has been setup, working with serverless functions is mostly about:

1. Creating a new function (not very often)
2. code, test, deploy, release (most of the time)

Well, exactly what happens in any other kind of development, right?
Webtask cli offer great foundamentals but in real world there are 2 things we almost always need that are not immediate (for lazy people like me) to get with simple commands:

1. secret environment variable to connect to databases, APIs…
2. different environments for development, testing, staging, production…

Here comes wt-cli-workflow, or wtw.

wt init -p CHOOSE_A_NAME
module.exports = function (cb) { cb(null, {versions: process.versions}) }
wt create hello.js

That won’t work cause is Node 8 code and wt containers by default are still Node 4.
Follow this guide to migrate the profile to Node 8.

wtw create myfile.js

This will create a new function named “myfile-dev”, with a specific url that will look like this:
https://XXX-some-code-XXX.sandbox.auth0-extend.com/myfile-dev
And the .env file will be used

To publish a different version for example to be used for testing

wtw create myfile.js test

This will create a new function named “myfile-test”, with a specific url that will look like this:
https://XXX-some-code-XXX.sandbox.auth0-extend.com/myfile-test
And the test.env file will be used

Run the file after it has already been created

wtw run myfile.js

This will update the myfile-dev version with the latest local code and will stay open to publish any new local changes

Here as well, a second parameter will change the environment, affecting which .env file will be used and the remote URL

Crete a function that with a specified schedule using cron

wtw cron myfile.js "*/10 * * * *"

That schedule mean every ten minues past the hour.
Use Corntab to master cron 🙂

This improves the original ‘wt ls’ and ‘wt rm’ commands:

wtw ls // accepts a search params that grep TS out of standard 'wt ls'
wtw rm //accepts a series of webtasks named and removed them using basic 'wt rm'

Please let me know what commands you would like to see, or feel free to fork and make pull requests 🙂

If you want to contribute to this project, here’s how