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Vapor on App Engine tutorial

Author(s): @mcdonamp , Published: 2017-03-21

This tutorial shows a sample Swift app built with Vapor deployed to App Engine.

Vapor is "a web framework and server for Swift that works on macOS and Ubuntu." It is open source on GitHub.

This tutorial assumes basic familiarity with Swift programming.

Objectives

Create a Swift "Hello, world" app that uses the Vapor framework.
Deploy the app to the Google App Engine flexible environment.

Costs

This tutorial uses billable components of Google Cloud Platform, including:

App Engine flexible environment

Use the Pricing Calculator to generate a cost estimate based on your projected usage.

Before you begin

Create a project in the Google Cloud Platform Console.
Enable billing for your project.
Install the Google Cloud SDK.

Handling dependencies

We'll use the Swift Package Manager to manage our app's dependencies.

Create a Package.swift file with the following contents:

import PackageDescription

let package = Package(
    name: "VaporGAE",
    targets: [
        Target(name: "VaporGAE", dependencies: [])
    ],
    dependencies: [
        .Package(url: "https://github.com/vapor/vapor.git", majorVersion: 1, minor: 1)
    ]
)

Writing the server

Create a main.swift with the following contents:

import Foundation
import Vapor

let drop = Droplet()

// Respond to App Engine health check requests
// TODO: see #2

// Basic GET request
// TODO: see #3

// Start server on 8080 (default)
drop.run()

Create a route to handle App Engine health-check requests (per the custom runtime docs):

// Respond to App Engine health check requests
drop.get("/_ah/health") { request in
    print("ALL - /_ah/health route handler...")
    return "OK"
}

Create a route to handle GET requests to /hello:

// Basic GET request
drop.get("/hello") { request in
    print("GET - /hello route handler...")
    return "Hello from Vapor on Google App Engine flexible environment!"
}

Creating the `Dockerfile`

Since Swift doesn't have an officially supported App Engine runtime, we'll create our own.

Create a Dockerfile with the following contents:

FROM ibmcom/swift-ubuntu:latest
LABEL Description="Docker image for Swift + Vapor on Google App Engine flexible environment."

# Expose default port for App Engine
EXPOSE 8080

# Add app source
ADD . /app
WORKDIR /app

# Build release
RUN swift build --configuration release

# Run the app
ENTRYPOINT [".build/release/VaporGAE"]

Deploying the app

Create an app.yaml file with the following contents:
```
runtime: custom
env: flex
```
Run the following command to deploy your app (make take several minutes):
```
gcloud app deploy
```
Run the following command to view your app, then append /hello to the URL:
```
gcloud app browse
```

If all goes well, you should see "Hello from Swift on Google App Engine flexible environment!".

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