Cloud Functions: Migrating to Node 8

Google Cloud Functions has been stuck on Node 6 since launch.

2018/07/25

But Google Cloud’s Next conference is this week, and they just announced the new Node 8 runtime.

I miss my async/await from Node 8, so I spent the morning upgrading my Cloud Functions.

async/await comes to Cloud Functions for Firebase

Steps to Upgrade to Node 8

Here’s what you need to do to get on the Node 8 train:

Upgrade your firebase-functions version to 2.0.0
Upgrade firebase-tools to 4.0.0
Add "engines": { "node": "8" } to your /functions/package.json

I had some difficulty figuring out these steps, so I manually deleted a Node 6 version of my function using the GCP console. That may have helped… but I have no way of testing that now.

Why Node 8?

Node 8 has async/await and the spread operator.

There’s probably more… but I don’t care. That’s all that I need right now.

Both of these features have been around on the front end for a while now. Developing in Node 6 has been sad.

Oh yeah… and you can use Node-8-only packages… for whatever that’s worth!

Examples

Here’s the repo that I’m working on right now: firebase-ssr-starter

And there’s a new Node 8 branch of the firebase/functions-samples repo.