Getting Started with Microservices Using Syncano’s Codeboxes

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Syncano is a really fascinating platform that gives you a hand with the backend and middleware of applications. We had a look at the capabilities of Syncano in my last article on How to Build a Daily Affirmations SMS Service with Stripe & Syncano where we put together a service that sent out daily SMS affirmations in a subscription service. All the backend and middleware is taken care of by Syncano. Very neat!

In this article, we are going to focus on Syncano’s concept of CodeBoxes more closely — what CodeBoxes are, how we make and run them in Syncano, and how we can connect them to external APIs. We’ll put together a demo using GitHub’s API to showcase just what is possible.

What is a CodeBox?

A CodeBox is a snippet of code that can be run in the cloud in a number of ways. Each CodeBox is intended to provide a single piece of our web application puzzle — one bit of functionality that contributes to the app as a whole.

To provide specifics about what we’d like the CodeBox to do in our web application, we can pass in arguments to a CodeBox, just as you would pass in arguments to a HTTP request. For example, we could have a CodeBox that looks up song lyrics stored in a database. It would accept two parameters, the song name and artist. A sample input for that CodeBox could be “Jack Sparrow” and “The Lonely Island”. The CodeBox would run using those parameters and provide the song lyrics if it knew the song. If not, it’d return a message saying it couldn’t find them.

One of my favourite things about CodeBoxes is that they can be created in a number of different languages. Syncano supports CodeBoxes written in Python, Golang, Node.js, Swift and Ruby. Not only that — CodeBoxes written in different languages can all work together to create a functioning web application. It is incredibly flexible!

The Code

For those who would like to follow along with the examples, the working code is available on GitHub. Use it, enjoy it, expand it — do as you wish.

How to Create a CodeBox

To illustrate the use of CodeBoxes in a Syncano application, we’ll be putting together a really simple app that looks up pull requests from a GitHub repo. It’s about time we had a way to keep an eye on how our GitHub team projects are going right?

To begin, we head to the Syncano Dashboard and create a new app. If you’re totally new to Syncano and need a bit of guidance on this, have a look at the previous SitePoint article on Syncano — it should help you out.

Then, we head to the “CodeBoxes” section on the left and click either of the icons with a plus on it to create a new CodeBox:

Then, in the popup box that appears:

• Enter in a title for your CodeBox - This can be a short but clear label to help you find it in the Dashboard, e.g. “Find GitHub Pull Requests”.
• Enter in a description for your CodeBox - This isn’t needed but I prefer to use it to include more details on exactly how the CodeBox is going to work, e.g. “Looks up and filters pull requests from a GitHub repo”.
• Choose the runtime environment you’d prefer to work in - In this article, we’ll be using Node.js, so if you’d like to follow along directly, choose that one!
• Click “Confirm” to create that CodeBox!

Once you have created your CodeBox, Syncano should bring you straight to the CodeBox editing screen. You’ll see a blank page with the text # Start coding!. We should follow that instruction and put something simple in there as an initial test run.

Running a CodeBox

Enter in a simple console.log() statement and then click the run button to the right to give it a test run:

Then, if we scroll down the page, we find a result screen with the successful output:

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by Patrick Catanzariti via SitePoint