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DESIGN.md

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Design of the Serverless Toolkit

The Serverless Toolkit is broken up into a variety of sub-projects that serve different purposes. In order to guide contributors for any contributions to the Serverless Toolkit, we wrote a set of guidelines that should be taken into consideration.

1. Modularity

While all modules together form the Serverless Toolkit, we offer with the different modules a way for people to use different parts of the project.

For example the Serverless Framework Integration makes use of @twilio-labs/serverless-api but not of any of the CLI functionality.

Right now the project breaks down into the following modules:

Project Content
twilio-run Core CLI logic of the Serverless Toolkit
create-twilio-function CLI logic for creating a new project. This can be called with npm init twilio-function and therefore should stay separate
@twilio-labs/plugin-serverless A thin wrapper exposing the commands of twilio-run and create-twilio-function to the Twilio CLI
@twilio-labs/serverless-api The core logic that interacts with the REST API. This should not include any CLI-related code. It should instead expose EventEmitter or Streams.
function-templates The repository hosting all Twilio Function templates exposed by the CLI toolings
@twilio-labs/serverless-twilio-runtime Twilio Runtime integration for the Serverless Framework
@twilio-labs/serverless-runtime-types TypeScript definitions for the Twilio Runtime environment

2. Designed for Twilio Functions development first

The tooling has some inconsistencies with other tooling of the Twilio CLI.

For example this tooling uses ACCOUNT_SID and AUTH_TOKEN in the .env file but the Twilio CLI and other tools use TWILIO_ACCOUNT_SID and TWILIO_AUTH_TOKEN.

This is by design because the Twilio Runtime will expose ACCOUNT_SID and AUTH_TOKEN to the user instead.

3. From Node.js Developers for Node.js Developers

Whenever possible the tooling should not introduce unnecessary configuration but make it intuitive for any Node.js developer to use it. Some examples:

  • npm install <dep> should just install a dependency
  • Adding an environment variable to the .env file should expose it to process.env

4. The Toolkit should work standalone

This goes inline with #3. A project should be able to be used by anyone who didn't use Twilio before. As a result setup instructions of any Serverless project should be as easy as:

git clone ... project
cd project
npm install
npm start

Therefore, you should be able to install the Toolkit as a developer dependency using:

npm install --save-dev twilio-run

5. Convention over configuration

Whenever we can avoid the developers having to learn and create configuration, we should.

For example we should prefer the filesystem to infer information rather than having an explicit configuration file.

6. Convenience over scriptability

While scriptability is important, the CLI part of the Toolkit should not be a thin-wrapper of the REST API to allow Shell scripting. This is a good use case for the Twilio CLI.

Instead it should focus on creating usable and convenient commands with as little configuration as possible.