#1 on my Christmas wish list for Firebase Cloud Functions
But I truly hope that Christmas comes early, because this would be awesome.
I’m a couple of weeks into building on top of Firebase Cloud Functions, and apart from all the things that are awesome (that there’s no need to mention, because it’s a lot). Just look at Brendan G. Lim in this video, he looks so happy with himself. And he deserves it. The Firebase team has really integrated cloud functions nicely into the dashboard and work flow.
But there are still something missing. Or to be more specific: there is one big hole in my current project’s need that I am hoping that they’re on the road map:
Scheduling (cron jobs)
Scheduling is just sitting there at the Google Cloud Platform, so close, almost in reach. But not yet integrated into Firebase. But I am not the one to just sit around and wait for it to happen, so I wrote a small App Engine app that takes care of it.
Edit#1: Due to some delay in publishing this article, I just discovered that the Firebase team has addressed the issue themselves in a repository on Github.
Edit#2: The Firebase team have now also published a post on this topic on the Firebase blog.
But for the sake of diversity, I will still post the implementation, more or less as I am using it in my own project. I can see that we took different approaches on it where Firebase chose to ping the cloud functions with PUB/SUB and I chose to simply send a HTTP request with an API key inserted.
The upside, as I see it, with my implementation is that the App Engine scheduler that I wrote is below 40 lines of code including configuration files (!!!). That’s how simple it is to get a little scheduler up and running.
But it’s a hack. So, dear Firebase, please implement scheduling into the cloud functions.
