Intro to Cloudflare Workers

Last updated on Dec 13, 2021 4 min read Developers

Welcome to a brief introduction to Cloudflare Workers.

What is Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers is a serverless application platform running on Cloudflare’s global cloud network in over 200 cities around the world, offering both free and paid plans.

Developer Docs: https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/

Some of the advantages of Cloudflare Workers are:

Dynamically respond to requests without needing to connect to an origin server at all
Perform data sanitization and validation before sending a request to your origin
Generate parallel requests to different services and combine the responses
Your code runs within milliseconds of your users worldwide
Say goodbye to cold starts—support for 0ms worldwide

However, convince yourself of it’s power and usefulness by trying it out yourself…

Our First Project

We will create a Cloudflare Workers which returns/renders a dynamic HTML response/page based on where the user visiting our site is in the world.

Here the final GitHub Repository of our first project. And below, the steps to follow:

Setup

Install and/or update npm on your computer:

npm install -g npm

Install Cloudflare Command-line (Wrangler):

npm install -g @cloudflare/wrangler

Check if Wrangler has been installed and it is the latest version:

wrangler --version

Connect Wrangler with your Cloudflare account (option 1):

wrangler login

NOTE: if you don’t have a Cloudflare account yet, click here – it’s FREE!

If the login process does not proceed as intended, you can manually add your API Token here (option 2):

wrangler config

Alternatively, go into the Wrangler CONFIG file and add your account_id (option 3):

cd PROJECT_NAME
sudo nano wrangler.toml

NOTE: you can find your API Tokens and Keys here.

Make sure you are logged in:

wrangler whoami

Generate Project

Generate first project (which will generate a folder with some files inside):

wrangler generate PROJECT_NAME

Now the fun part is that we will create a template.js file with some code for a landing page.

In the main index.js file we will have to call import template from './template' – in order to call our template.js –, as well as set template(request.cf) as the new Response body. Additionally, change the content-type to text/html;charset=UTF-8.

The index.js file should look like this:

import template from './template'

addEventListener('fetch', event => {
  event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
})

async function handleRequest(request) {
  return new Response(template(request.cf), {        // body
    headers: { 'content-type': 'text/html;charset=UTF-8' },  // init
  })
}

Allow import other modules and npm packages on Workers by changing the type in the wrangler.toml file:

type = "webpack"

In order to use country code emojis, install this package:

npm i country-code-emoji

The template.js file should look like this:

import flag from 'country-code-emoji'

const template = cf => {
    const emoji = flag(cf.country) || "👋🏻"

    return `
      <!DOCTYPE html>
      <html lang="en">
        <head>
          <meta charset="utf-8" />
          <meta http-equiv="x-ua-compatible" content="ie=edge" />
          <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />
          <title>Hello!</title>
          <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://unpkg.com/modern-css-reset/dist/reset.min.css" />
          <style>
            body {
              background: #eee;
              display: flex;
              align-items: center;
              justify-content: center;
              min-height: 100vh;
              font-family: sans-serif;
            }
            div.container {
              background: #fff;
              border-radius: 1rem;
              padding: 4rem;
            }
          </style>
        </head>
        <body>
          <div class="container">
            <h1>Hello there! You're connecting from ${cf.city} in ${cf.country} ${emoji}</h1>
          </div>
        </body>
      </html>
      `
  }

export default template

NOTE: you can choose different IncomingRequestCfProperties instead of cf.country, such as cf.colo, cf.asn, or cf.city.

Preview the project:

wrangler preview

Production:

wrangler dev

Publish our project to Cloudflare:

wrangler publish

Result

The final result can be found here, including the GitHub Repository.

Use Cases

The amount of Use Cases and applications for Cloudflare Workers are only limited by your imagination and time! It’s a powerful and amazing tool.

Some examples of Use Cases are:

Discover more Case Studies with Workers, and check out the Built With section to also learn more and get inspired by other projects.

Automate Deployment

In order to automate our work, we can have this project on our GitHub repository, and use GitHub Action to automatically deploy the main branch into the production environment.

We can add a new .github/workflows/buildAndDeploy.yml file to our repository, adding the following content:

name: buildAndDeployWorker
on: push
jobs:
  deploy:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    name: Deploy
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v2
      - name: Publish
        uses: cloudflare/wrangler-action@1.3.0
        with:
          apiToken: ${{ secrets.CF_API_TOKEN }}

Now we need to get our Cloudflare API Token by going to https://dash.cloudflare.com/profile/api-tokens and click on Create Token, and selecting the Edit Cloudflare Workers template.

Once created, we have add our API Token from Cloudflare to our GitHub repository, by going to our repository’s Settings > Secrets > New repository secret, adding CF_API_TOKEN with our Cloudflare API Token as the value. This will populate ${{ secrets.CF_API_TOKEN }}.

Now, every time we push changes to our repository, those changes will automatically be deployed to our Workers.

Disclaimer

I want to thank the Introduction to Cloudflare Workers by Kristian Freeman Course.

Educational purposes only, and this blog post does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Cloudflare.

More on Cloudflare

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