Build and Deploy a Serverless Node.js App powered by Cosmic JS

Serverless application development is growing in popularity in no small part due to the appealing proposition to “build apps, not infrastructure”. This way of building apps provides many benefits including not having to manage server infrastructure, infinite scalability and not having to pay for idle server time, paying only when your service is in use. The platform further abstracts building serverless apps into a delightful developer experience that helps you get a cloud function-powered app up and running fast. Serverless provides a CMS API for teams to manage content for any new or existing application. The gets you up and running with a Serverless app connected to the Cosmic JS CMS. Cosmic JS Cosmic JS Serverless Starter App In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to get started with the in a matter of minutes. And as a bonus I’ll show you the steps to transform any Node.js app into an infinitely scalable Node.js Serverless App. Let’s get started. Cosmic JS Serverless Starter app TL;DR Check out the Cosmic JS Serverless Starter on GitHub Install the Serverless Starter To install the Cosmic JS Serverless Starter, run the following commands: npm i -g cosmic-cli These commands do the following:1. Install the 2. Login to your (you may need to create a new Bucket, if so, it’ll walk you through this 😀)3. Download the and import the demo content to your selected Bucket. Cosmic CLI Cosmic JS Account Serverless Starter Once it’s downloaded, you’ll be prompted to start the app with the following commands: cd serverless-starter Your application should now be running at http://localhost:3000 Get Ready for Lift Off Now that we have our application running locally, let’s get ready to launch it to the AWS cloud. First we’ll need to connect our AWS credentials. To find these on your AWS account, . Serverless has a great walk through on their website After you’ve retrieved your AWS keys run the following commands: export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=your-aws-key-idexport AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=your-aws-secret-key And now we’re all set to launch our Serverless Starter to AWS. Run the following command to login to the Serverless service and deploy our app: npm i -g serverlessserverless loginCOSMIC_BUCKET=your-bucket-slug serverless deploy The serverless deploy command does all the heavy-lifting for us. It performs some magic behind the scenes with our AWS account, then once our app is available, it will provide the endpoints to find the deployed app. Adding the environment variable , connects our deployed app to our Cosmic JS Bucket via the Cosmic JS API. This enables us to manage content for our newly deployed serverless app from the . COSMIC_BUCKET Cosmic JS Admin Dashboard From the output above, you can see our available where our Serverless app is now deployed. endpoints Make any Node.js App Serverless-Ready So we ran a few commands and pushed the Cosmic JS Serverless Starter app to AWS… cool. But let’s go a bit deeper and take a look at how we transformed the and how we can convert most any Node.js app into a serverless app. Node Starter app To transform the to a Serverless app, we had to create a file and set the config to handle dynamic routes. This is accomplished in the function > app > events area to indicate the dynamic http events. It looks like this: Edit serverless.yml Node Starter serverless.yml Next we needed to edit the entry point for the app, to export the main handler function. We also included the to wrap our Express app for Serverless use. Here’s the app.js file converted to serverless: Edit app.js app.js file serverless-http node module In Conclusion With a few edits, you can quickly transform a Node.js app into a serverless app. The platform abstracts the complexity of AWS account configuration to give you a delightful development experience. Add Cosmic JS-powered content and you have an infinitely scalable serverless app with content managed via the Cosmic JS API. No servers to manage, no CMS to maintain. Building apps, not infrastructure is the future! Serverless If you have any comments or questions about building serverless apps with Cosmic JS, and . reach out to us on Twitter join the conversation on Slack