Getting started

Getting started

Build a sample Application

Imagine we have a static website and need server logic to store contacts and validate data. This would require a server, a database and some code to glue it all together. With a serverless approach, we can just sprinkle little functions (that we call actions) on top of our static website and let OpenServerless take care of the rest. No more setting up VMs, backend web servers, databases, etc.

In this tutorial, we will see how you can take advantage of several services which are already part of a OpenServerless deployment and develop a contact form page for users to fill it with their emails and messages, which are then sent via email to us and stored in a database.

Finally, we’ll see how to activate external services using Web hooks.

Openserverless CLI: Ops

Serverless development is mostly performed on the CLI, and OpenServerless has its tool called ops. It’s a command line tool that allows you to deploy (and interact with) the platform seamlessly to the cloud, locally and in custom environments.

Ops is cross-platform and can be installed on Windows, Linux and MacOS. You can find the project and the sources on Apache OpenServerless Cli Github page

Deploy OpenServerless

To start using OpenServerless you can refer to the Installation Guide. You can follow the local installation to quickly get started with OpenServerless deployed on your machine, or if you want to follow the tutorial on a deployment on cloud you can pick one of the many supported cloud provider. Once installed come back here!

Enabling Services

After installing OpenServerless on a local machine with Docker or on a supported cloud, you can enable or disable the services offered by the platform. As we will use Postgres database, the Static content with the Minio S3 compatible storage, let’s run in the terminal:

ops config enable --postgres --static --minio --cron

This is the default set of services.

Since you should already have a deployment running, we have to update it with the new services so they get deployed. Simply run:

ops update apply

And with just that (when it finishes), we have everything we need ready to use!

💡 NOTE

If you’ve installed the local development environment using the instructions from the Docker installation page you’ve already the base services enabled by default.

You can check what services are enabled with the command:

ops config status

This should be the output:

OPERATOR_COMPONENT_MINIO=true
OPERATOR_COMPONENT_MONGODB=true
OPERATOR_COMPONENT_POSTGRES=true
OPERATOR_COMPONENT_STATIC=true
OPERATOR_COMPONENT_CRON=true
OPERATOR_COMPONENT_REDIS=true

Create a user

If you don’t have a user, it’s the time to create one. We we’ll use it to work on this tutorial.

⚠ WARNING

To create a user, we need to be the administrator, like described in this section.

ops admin adduser opstutorial <youremail> SimplePassword --all 

The output will be:

Generated OPSTUTORIAL user secrets.
Creating user opstutorial...
whiskuser.nuvolaris.org/opstutorial created

Login as user

After user creation, it’s time to perform ops login.

💡 NOTE

The ops ide login command will log you in on the server and dump the proper configuration of active services for your user. The configuration is automatically used by ops for all the tasks. You only need to run ops ide login once (unless you need to log in to another OpenServerless server or with another OpenServerless user).

Change your APIHOST accordly, if you’ve specified a custom one during the system setup

ops ide login opstutorial http://localhost:80

*** Configuring Access to OpenServerless ***
apihost=http://localhost:80 username=opstutorial
Logging in http://localhost:80 as opstutorial
Enter Password: 
Successfully logged in as opstutorial.
ok: whisk auth set. Run 'wsk property get --auth' to see the new value.
ok: whisk API host set to http://localhost:80
OpenServerless host and auth set successfully. You are now ready to use ops!

Cleaning Up

Once you are done and want to clean the services configuration, just run:

ops config disable --postgres --static --minio --cron