Ballerina Azure Functions Extension

Annotation based Azure Functions extension implementation for Ballerina.

Azure Function App Setup

• An Azure "Function App" needs to be created in a given resource group with the following requirements
  • Runtime stack - "Java 17"
  • Hosting operating system - "Windows" (default; Linux is not supported in Azure for custom handlers at the moment)

Supported Triggers and bindings:

An Azure Function consists of a trigger and optional bindings. A trigger defines how a function is invoked. A binding is an approach in which you can declaratively connect other resources to the function. There are input and output bindings. An input binding is a source of data into the function. An output binding allows outputting data from the function to an external resource. For more information, go to Azure Functions triggers and bindings concepts.

• HTTP - Trigger and Output Binding
• Queue - Trigger and Output Binding
• Blob - Trigger, Input and Output Binding
• Twilio - Output Binding
• CosmosDB - Trigger, Input and Output Binding
• Timer - Trigger

Sample Code:

In Ballerina, Triggers are represented with listeners. When the af:HttpListener gets attached to the service, it implies that the function is a HTTP Trigger. The resource function behaves exactly the same as a service written from ballerina/http. It supports http:Payload, http:Header annotations for parameters. Input binding annotations can be used to annotate parameters to make use of external services in azure. if no annotations are specified for a parameter, it's identified as a query parameter.

Output bindings are defined in the return type definition. For services with the HttpListener attachment, HttpOutput is the default Output binding. Of course, you can override the default behavior by specifying them explicitly in the return type.

import ballerinax/azure.functions as af;

service / on new af:HttpListener() {
    resource function get hello(string name) returns string {
        return "Hello, " + name + "!";
    }
}

In the code sample shown above, it has an empty service path and resource path named hello. The accessor is get. It expects a request with a query parameter for the field name. The required artifact generation and data binding will be handled by ballerinax/azure.functions package automatically.

The Azure Functions functionality is implemented as a compiler extension. Thus, artifact generation happens automatically when you build a Ballerina module. Let's see how this works by building the above code.

$ bal build
Compiling source
        wso2/azure_functions_deployment:0.1.0

Generating executable
        @azure.functions:Function: get-hello

        Execute the below command to deploy the function locally:
        func start --script-root target/azure_functions --java

        Execute the below command to deploy Ballerina Azure Functions:
        func azure functionapp publish <function_app_name> --script-root target/azure_functions 

        target/bin/azure_functions_deployment.jar

Build from the source

Set Up the prerequisites

1. Download and install Java SE Development Kit (JDK) version 17 (from one of the following locations).

• Oracle

• OpenJDK

  Note: Set the JAVA_HOME environment variable to the path name of the directory into which you installed JDK.

2. Export GitHub Personal access token with read package permissions as follows,

    export packageUser=<Username>
    export packagePAT=<Personal access token>
   

3. Download and install Docker.

Build the source

Execute the commands below to build from source.

1. To build the library:

   ./gradlew clean build
   

2. To run the integration tests:

   ./gradlew clean test
   

3. To run a group of tests

   ./gradlew clean test -Pgroups=<test_group_names>
   

4. To build the package without the tests:

   ./gradlew clean build -x test
   

5. To debug the tests:

   ./gradlew clean test -Pdebug=<port>
   

6. To debug with Ballerina language:

   ./gradlew clean build -PbalJavaDebug=<port>
   

7. Publish the generated artifacts to the local Ballerina central repository:

   ./gradlew clean build -PpublishToLocalCentral=true
   

8. Publish the generated artifacts to the Ballerina central repository:

   ./gradlew clean build -PpublishToCentral=true
   

Contribute to Ballerina

As an open source project, Ballerina welcomes contributions from the community.

For more information, go to the contribution guidelines.

Code of conduct

All contributors are encouraged to read the Ballerina Code of Conduct.

Useful links

• For more information go to the azure.functions library.
• For example demonstrations of the usage, go to Ballerina By Examples.
• Chat live with us via our Discord server.
• Post all technical questions on Stack Overflow with the #ballerina tag.