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Making Deploying Functions Even Easier With Faas-cli Up Using OpenFaaS

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I recently discovered that the faas-cli allows you to append your function’s yaml to an existing file when generating a new function. And that faas-cli up does the build, push and deploy for you.

The way I always did it:

Usually, I will go through this flow: create, build, push, deploy, when creating 2 functions that will be in the same stack:

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$ faas-cli new --lang python3 fn-old-foo \
--prefix=ruanbekker \
--gateway https://openfaas.domain.com

$ faas-cli build -f fn-old-foo.yml && \
faas-cli push -f fn-old-foo.yml && \
faas-cli deploy -f fn-old-foo.yml

And for my other function:

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$ faas-cli new --lang python3 fn-old-bar \
--prefix=ruanbekker \
--gateway https://openfaas.domain.com

$ faas-cli build -f fn-old-bar.yml && \
faas-cli push -f fn-old-bar.yml && \
faas-cli deploy -f fn-old-bar.yml

And then you are ready to invoke those functions.

The new discovered way

So recently I discovered that you can append the yaml definition of your function to an existing yaml file, and use faas-cli up to build, push and deploy your functions:

Generating the first function:

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$ faas-cli new --lang python3 fn-foo \
--prefix=ruanbekker \
--gateway https://openfaas.domain.com

Stack file written: fn-foo.yml

Now that we have fn-foo.yml in our current work directory, we will append the second function the that file:

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$ faas-cli new --lang python3 fn-bar \
--prefix=ruanbekker \
--gateway https://openfaas.domain.com \
--append fn-foo.yml

Stack file updated: fn-foo.yml

Now, when using faas-cli up it expects by default that the filename is stack.yml which we can change with -f but to keep this as easy as possible, we will change the filename to stack.yml:

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$ mv fn-foo.yml stack.yml

At the moment, our stack.yml will look like this:

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$ cat stack.yml
provider:
  name: openfaas
  gateway: https://openfaas.domain.com
functions:
  fn-foo:
    lang: python3
    handler: ./fn-foo
    image: ruanbekker/fn-foo:latest
  fn-bar:
    lang: python3
    handler: ./fn-bar
    image: ruanbekker/fn-bar:latest

Deploying our functions is as easy as:

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$ faas-cli up
...
Deploying: fn-foo.

Deployed. 202 Accepted.
URL: https://openfaas.domain.com/function/fn-foo

Deploying: fn-bar.

Deployed. 202 Accepted.
URL: https://openfaas.domain.com/function/fn-bar

Simply amazing. OpenFaaS done a great job in making it as simple and easy as possible to get your functions from zero to deployed in seconds.