Deploying My First App to Cloud Functions

This past week I have been building a simple CRUD app for a freelance project. Since this is so small in scope, I decided to use express. A basic REST api was all I needed. When it came to setting up a development environment, I was going to setup a compute instance that had nginx, install node, and all that fun stuff. I realized this would be a cool time to see how hard it is to setup Google's Cloud Functions. It turns out there were only a few gotchas, and after a couple hours I had the whole app up and running without any servers to manage! It's truly awesome. This post is covering how I set this up on Google, but most of it will apply to AWS Lambda or whatever Azure is offering 😜

Export your function

This part sounds like a lot of work. How do you export an express app and have it work without a bunch of code changes? It turns out you can do this with a whole one line code change at the very minimum. This is because when you use Cloud functions that are triggered by an HTTP request…