Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

This is a 3 part exercise on how to create and use your own quote API with Netlify functions.

A serverless function is a single purpose function that is maintained and hosted on a cloud provider's infrastructure. AWS Lambdas is Amazon's solution to serverless functions and you can think of Netlify functions as a friendly wrapper around AWS Lambdas.

Let's start by installing the Netlify command line interface:

npm install -g netlify-cli

Using Create React App, set up a new project and navigate into it:

npx create-react-app my-random-quotes
cd my-random-quotes

Create a netlify.toml file with the following content:

[build]
  functions = "functions/"

This will define where we will put our API code. In this case, a functions directory relative to our project root.

Let's create a starter function:

netlify functions:create

This will invoke an interactive prompt. Pick the js-hello-world template and name your function quotes.

A quotes subdirectory will be created under the functions directory. It will also create a quotes.js file.

Open the quotes.js file and replace the contents with the following:

// $project_root/functions/quotes/quotes.js
exports.handler = async (event, context) => {

  const quotes = [
    {"quote": "You gotta be kidding me?"},
    {"quote": "Will you be my neighbor?"},
    {"quote": "Liz is awesome!"}
  ]; 

  const number = Math.floor(Math.random() * quotes.length);
  const quote = quotes[number];

   return {
     statusCode: 200,
     body: JSON.stringify(quote)
   };

};

Don't worry too much about the content of this code if it seems unfamiliar. It's just a bit of Node.js that will randomly return a quote from the quotes array.

Start a development environment with the following command:

netlify dev

Ok, the hard part is over! Let's test our function locally by opening up a browser and navigating to localhost:8888/.netlify/functions/quotes.

If everything goes as expected, you should see a JSON object containing a random quote.

In the next post, we'll setup a Netlify account and deploy our function.