Switching OpenWhisk environments

When developing with OpenWhisk, it's useful to use separate environments for working locally or on the cloud for development, staging and production of your application. In OpenWhisk terms, this means setting the host and the API key for your wsk command line application. $ wsk property set –apihost $host –auth $key (Of course, for live and staging, ideally, you will be using a build server!) For a Vagrant install of OpenWhisk, the host is 192.168.33.13… continue reading.

Posted on 19 April 2017 in Bluemix, OpenWhisk

POSTing data using KituraNet

I had a need to send a POST request with a JSON body from Swift and as I had KituraNet and SwiftyJSON already around, it proved to reasonably easy. To send a POST request using KituraNet, I wrote this code: let url = "http://httpbin.org/post". // Change to the actual URL let dataToSend = ["foo": ["bar": "baz"]] // Change to the actual data // body needs to be of type Data, use SwiftyJSON to convert let… continue reading.

Posted on 10 April 2017 in OpenWhisk, Swift

Using CircleCI for a PHP project

For a new client project, I've decided to use CircleCI to run my tests every time I push to GitHub. This turned out to be quite easy; this is how I did it. I started by creating a config file, .circleci/config.yml containing the following: version: 2 jobs: build: working_directory: /var/www/html docker: – image: php:7.1-apache environment: APP_ENV: test steps: – run: name: Install system packages command: apt-get update && apt-get -y install git – run: name:… continue reading.

Posted on 3 April 2017 in PHP

Automatically converting PDF to Keynote

I use rst2pdf to create presentations which provides me with a PDF file. When it comes to presenting on stage, on Linux there are tools such as pdfpc and on Mac there's Keynote. Keynote doesn't read PDF files by default, so we have to convert them and the tool I use for this is Melissa O'Neill's PDF to Keynote. This is a GUI tool, so I manually create the Keynote file when I need it… continue reading.

Posted on 30 March 2017 in Computing, rst2pdf

Detecting OpenWhisk web actions

I've already written about OpenWhisk web actions and how they allow you to send a status code and HTTP headers to the client by returning a dictionary with the keys status, headers and body from your main() method: func main(args: [String:Any]) -> [String:Any] { return [ "body": "Hello world", "statusCode": 200, "headers": [ "Content-Type": "text/xml", ], ] } If this test action is in the default namespace, then we create it with wsk action update… continue reading.

Posted on 27 March 2017 in OpenWhisk, Swift

Calling an OpenWhisk action in Swift

As OpenWhisk is a Functions as a Service system, it makes sense to create actions that do one thing and call other actions when they want other work done. As an example, in DrinksChooser, the choose action calls the incrementDrinkCount action which increments the count of the recommended drink in Redis. This way, choose doesn't have to know anything about Redis as that's not its job. In OpenWhisk's Swift environment, there's the Whisk.invoke() method to… continue reading.

Posted on 23 March 2017 in OpenWhisk, Swift

Passing secrets to your OpenWhisk action

There is only one way to pass data into your OpenWhisk action: parameters. Your function receives a dictionary of parameters and returns one. Let's explore how you can set these parameters. Parameters passed to the action You can see this by creating this action: test.swift func main(args: [String:Any]) -> [String:Any] { return args } Add the action to OpenWhisk with: wsk action update params params.swift -a web-export true and test: $ wsk action invoke -b… continue reading.

Posted on 20 March 2017 in OpenWhisk, Swift

Quick tip: OpenWhisk autocompletion

I've just discovered how to enable Bash autocompletion for the wsk command line tool! $ cd /usr/local/bin $ wsk sdk install bashauto This will create a file called wsk_cli_bash_completion.sh in your /usr/local/bin directory. Now, source this file within your .bash_profile or equivalent: $ echo -e "\n# OpenWhisk autocompletion\nsource ~/bin/wsk_cli_bash_completion.sh" >> ~/.bash_profile Start a new terminal window, (or source ~/.bash_profile in your current one) and you can now press the tab key after typing wsk to… continue reading.

Posted on 16 March 2017 in OpenWhisk

Error handling in OpenWhisk actions

With a standard OpenWhisk action, we return a dictionary of the data and let OpenWhisk deal with converting it to JSON etc. OpenWhisk will also set the correct 200 status code. How do we handle an error though? It turns out that if there is a key called "error" in our returned dictionary, then all the other data is ignored and an error is sent back. To show this, consider this action: func main(args: [String:Any])… continue reading.

Posted on 13 March 2017 in OpenWhisk, Swift

Using ngrok to test on a mobile

To test a website that you're developing on your local computer on a mobile device such as a phone or tablet use ngrok. This is the way to do it: Start up ngrok: $ ngrok http my-dev-site.local:80 This will start up ngrok and give you a "Forwarding" URL such as http://24f55bf5.ngrok.io. In this case, it will direct all traffic to that URL to http://my-dev-site.local. If you run your website on a different port, such as… continue reading.

Posted on 9 March 2017 in Software

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