Add Cloud Resources to Fastify Apps

In this guide we'll be scaffolding a new Fastify application and including the Nitric framework to allow for the addition of other cloud resources like topics, queues and buckets.

Prerequisites

To complete this guide you'll need the following:

• Node.js installed locally
• Nitric CLI installed
• (optional) Your choice of an AWS, GCP or Azure account

Getting Started

Let's start by setting up a Nitric project and adding Fastify:

nitric new fastify-example "official/JavaScript - Starter"

Then install dependencies and add fastify:

cd fastify-example
yarn install
yarn add fastify

You can go ahead and open this new project in your editor of choice. You should see a project structure similar to:

├── functions
│   ├── hello.js
├── node_modules
│   ├── ...
├── .gitignore
├── index.js
├── nitric.yaml
├── package.json
├── README.md
└── yarn.lock

In this structure you'll notice the functions folder. By default, this is where Nitric expects the entrypoint code for your application. However, that's just a convention, we can change that to anything else that suits our needs.

Let's start by replacing the default hello.js function with an app.js file ready for the Fastify application:

rm ./functions/hello.js

touch ./functions/app.js

Now, let's add some Fastify code to get things started.

import Fastify from 'fastify'
import { http } from '@nitric/sdk'

const fastify = Fastify({
  logger: true,
})

fastify.get('/', (request, reply) => {
  reply.send('Hello World!')
})

http(fastify)

At this point we're ready to start testing locally. The project comes with a dev script by default, let's run that now:

yarn dev

If everything is working, part of the output will look like this:

SUCCESS  Started Local Services! (1s)
Local running, use ctrl-C to stop

Proxy | Endpoint
8000  | http://localhost:4001

Dev Dashboard | http://localhost:49152

Your Fastify application will now be running with Nitric acting as a proxy, in this case it's available on port 4001. We can test this in another terminal or web browser.

curl localhost:4001
Hello World!

Enhancing Fastify with Nitric

With everything working so far, now is a good time to see how we can add new resources to the Fastify app using Nitric. In this example, let's add a pub/sub topic which allows us to perform work in the background, but still respond quick via the HTTP API.

You can update the app.js file like so:

import Fastify from 'fastify'
import { http, topic } from '@nitric/sdk'

const workRequests = topic('work-requests').for('publishing')
const fastify = Fastify({
  logger: true,
})

fastify.get('/', async (request, reply) => {
  await workRequests.publish()
  reply.send('Hello World!')
})

http(fastify)

We'll also add a new function to do the background work:

touch functions/worker.js

Add this code to that file:

import { topic } from '@nitric/sdk'

const sleep = (ms) => new Promise((res) => setTimeout(res, ms))

topic('work-requests').subscribe(async (ctx) => {
  console.log('Starting new request')
  // wait for 2 seconds to simulate a long running task
  await sleep(2000)
  console.log('Request processed')
})

If it's still running, your application should hot-reload with these changes. Now, when you browse to localhost:4001 you'll notice that the console outputs these lines with a 2 second delay between each line:

Starting new request
Request processed

At this point, we can stop the running application and try to deploy it to a cloud provider.

Deploy to the cloud

This is where the true value of Nitric shines. You don't need to perform any manual cloud deployment activities or add solutions like Terraform to get this project into your cloud environment, Nitric takes care of that for you.

To perform the deployment we'll create a stack, stacks give Nitric the config needed for a specific cloud instance of this project, such as the provider and region.

The new stack command can help you create the stack by following prompts. In this case we'll use AWS as an example:

nitric stack new
? What should we name this stack? dev
? Which provider do you want to deploy with? aws
? Which region should the stack deploy to? us-east-1

This command will create a file named nitric-dev.yaml, with contents like this:

name: dev
provider: nitric/aws@0.30.0
region: us-east-1

With the stack file in place we can run the deployment:

nitric up
SUCCESS  Images Built (51s)
SUCCESS  Configuration gathered (6s)
SUCCESS
         API | Endpoint
         app | https://xxxxxxxxxx.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com
Deployed Stack (1m14s)

Go ahead and test your new Fastify+Nitric app in the cloud, you can start with the API Gateway URL returned by the up command.

What next?

Now that you have the basics down, try exploring other Nitric resources available to enhance your app.

• Collections
• Schedules
• Storage
• Messages
• Secrets