Whisk Deploy — Zip Actions with file Include & Exclude

This blog post is a follow up on a earlier post on how to create a zip action using Whisk Deploy.

OpenWhisk provides an ability to create an action using a .zip archive which can contain any number of action files including all dependencies. Whisk Deploy has a support to specify function pointing to a directory with action files for creating a .zip archive from the entire directory content and then creating a zip action.

File Level Include

We recently introduced a feature in Whisk Deploy to specify include equivalent of programming paradigm import, for example, multiple actions having reference to common library such as:

$ cd actions/
$ ls -1 ./
common/
greeting1/
greeting2/
manifest.yaml 
$ ls -1 common/
utils.js
$ ls -1 greeting1/
index.js
package.json
$ ls -1 greeting2/
index.js
package.json

Here, action file index.js under greeting1/ and action file index.js undergreeting2/ refers to the utils.js from common/.

index.js under actions/greeting1/:

index.js under actions/greeting2/:

manifest.yaml:

include takes a list of files/directories which needs to be included in an action. Each list of item can either have source and/or destination, for example:

include:
    - [source]
    - [source, destination]

Note: (1)source is considered relative path to where manifest.yaml file is located. destination is considered relative path to the action directory i.e. actions/greeting1 and actions/greeting2 in the following example. (2) If destination is not specified, its considered same as source.

manifest.yaml

include can contain different combination of source and destination:

• include with just source:

include:
    - [actions/common/utils.js]

With this specification, utils.js will be copied under actions/greeting/actions/common/utils.js and can be referred to from index.js with:

var utils = require('./actions/common/utils.js')

• include with rename:

include:
    - ["actions/common/utils.js", "./common/myUtils.js"]

With this specification, utils.js will be copied as actions/greeting/common/myUtils.js and can be referred to from index.js with:

var utils = require('./common/myUtils.js')

• include with different path:

include:
    - ["actions/common/utils.js", "./common/utility/utils.js"]

With this specification, utils.js will be copied as actions/greeting/common/utility/utils.js and can be referred to from index.js with:

var utils = require('./common/utility/utils.js')

• include with wild character *:

include:
    - ["actions/common/*.js", "./common/"]

With this specification, utils.js and any other file with .js extension will be copied under actions/greeting/common/ and can be referred to from index.js with:

var utils = require('./common/utils.js')

Directory Level Include

include also supports specifying directory which is recursively copied to specified destination before including it the archive, for example, libs has a list of libraries which are referenced by the index.js under greeting3/:

$ cd actions/
$ ls -1
libs/
greeting3/
manifest.yaml
$ ls -1 libs/
lib1/
lib2/
lib3/
$ ls -1 libs/lib1/
utils.js
$ ls -1 libs/lib2/
utils.js
$ ls -1 libs/lib3/
utils.js
$ ls -1 greeting3/
index.js
package.json

index.js under actions/greeting3/:

manifest.yaml under actions/:

manifest.yaml

Here, the entire libs dir is recursively copied to actions/greeting3/libs/.

• include with wild character *:

Example 1:

include:
    - ["actions/libs/*/utils.js", "libs/"]

With this specification, utils.js file under any directory within libs will be copied under libs/ and can be referred to from index.js similar to the above example:

var lib1 = require('./libs/lib1/utils.js')
var lib2 = require('./libs/lib2/utils.js')
var lib3 = require('./libs/lib3/utils.js')

Example 2:

include:
    - ["actions/*/*/utils.js"]

With this specification, utils.js file within two directories under actions will be copied under actions/ and can be referred to from index.js with:

var lib1 = require('./actions/libs/lib1/utils.js')
var lib2 = require('./actions/libs/lib2/utils.js')
var lib3 = require('./actions/libs/lib3/utils.js')

Example 3:

include:
    - ["actions/*/*/utils.js", "actions/"]

With this specification, utils.js file within two directories under actions will be copied under actions/ and can be referred to from index.js with:

var lib1 = require('./actions/libs/lib1/utils.js')
var lib2 = require('./actions/libs/lib2/utils.js')
var lib3 = require('./actions/libs/lib3/utils.js')

Exclude

exclude can be specified as a list of files or directories with wildcard characters *:

exclude:
    - actions/common/*.js
    - actions/libs/*/utils.js

Here is a very common usage of combination of include and exclude:

manifest.yaml:

Good Luck 👍!