now-boom

Cli to mimic Zeit's serverless environment locally (for node apis).

(https://zeit.co/docs/v2/getting-started/introduction-to-now/)

Installation

Install: npm i now-boom --save-dev

or: yarn add -D now-boom

To run: boom

This creates a server listening on port 8000.

To use a different port use boom --port <port-number> or boom -p <port-number>

Implementation:

now-boom requires a folder called api.

Each sub-folder will create an API endpoint.

The sub-folder must contain an index.js file.

E.g.

|-- api
      |-- send
            |-- index.js
      |-- add
            |-- index.js

Maps to:

 http://localhost:8000/api/send
 http://localhost:8000/api/add

Nested folders will also create endpoints.

E.g.

|-- api
      |-- send
            |-- inner-send
                  |-- index.js

Maps to;

  http://localhost:8000/api/send/inner-send

Methods

Each endpoint can be accessed with:

GET POST PUT DELETE & PATCH

methods.

Viewing endpoints:

To view end points run boom -map or boom -m

This will return a list of endpoints.

Each endpoint is flagged to identify whether it returns a function.

Environment variables:

now-boom checks to see if the project has a now.json file.

If now.json does not exist a warning will be displayed.

To add env variables to your project simply add them to the now.json file as per zeit documentation (https://zeit.co/docs/v2/deployments/environment-variables-and-secrets/).

now.boom will add each env variable listed in now.json to process.env

E.g.

//now.json

{
      "env": {
            "API_KEY": "value",
       }
}

Can be accessed in the relevant function using:

const dotEnv = require("dotenv");

dotEnv.config();

const { API_KEY } = process.env;

module.exports = (req, res) => {
      console.log(API_KEY)
      // => value
}

This allows for a single source of truth for env variables, and solves the problem of having to use a separate .env file in development.