Development

How to develop for triggers and functions

To aid in the development of new libraries of triggers and functions, you can use the type declaration files for the triggers and functions API, which allows your preferred development environment to provide autocompletion and type checking. You can install this information using the following command:

npm install https://gitpkg.now.sh/RedisGears/RedisGears/js_api --save-dev

Or you can manually add it as a devDependency to your package.json file:

"devDependencies": {
  "@redis/gears-api": "https://gitpkg.now.sh/RedisGears/RedisGears/js_api"
}

Example project setup

Create an empty directory for your new triggers and functions project, my_first_project. Navigate to the folder and run the following command:

$ npm init -y -f
npm WARN using --force Recommended protections disabled.
Wrote to /home/work/my_first_project/package.json:

{
  "name": "my_first_project",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

Update the package.json to add the gears API to the devDependencies object.

{
  "name": "my_first_project",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@redis/gears-api": "https://gitpkg.now.sh/RedisGears/RedisGears/js_api"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

Install the dependencies using npm install.

Create a new file, index.js and import the gears-api module. While this step is not strictly necessary, doing so will enable code intelligent code completion when adding the registerFunction:

#!js name=lib api_version=1.0

import { redis } from '@redis/gears-api';

redis.registerFunction("test", ()=>{
    return "test";
});

To automate the deployment, update the scripts section in package.json:

"scripts": {
  "deploy": "gears-api index.js"
}

Now you can deploy your code to Redis Stack using the following command:

> npm run deploy -- -r redis://localhost:6379

> deploy
> gears-api index.js

Deployed! :)

The provided URL should follow the following format:

<redis[s]://[[username][:password]@][host][:port][/db-number]>

You can now run your Redis Stack function:

127.0.0.1:6379> TFCALL lib.test 0
"test"

Example function using a third-party npm package

If you want to use a third-party npm package in your Redis Stack function, the overall process is nearly the same as already discussed, with just a couple of differences.

First, you'll need to install your package using npm install. For this example, the pi symbol from the math.js library will be used in a simple function that calculates the area of a circle.

npm install mathjs

Note: your package.json file will also be updated with the new dependency. For example:

"dependencies": {
    "mathjs": "^12.0.0"
}

Next, you'll import the required symbol(s) into your function.

#!js api_version=1.0 name=lib

import { redis } from '@redis/gears-api';
import { pi } from 'mathjs';

function calculateCircleArea(client, radius) {
  return pi * radius * radius;
}

redis.registerFunction('calculateArea', calculateCircleArea);

Load and run your new function as described in the previous section.