Third party npm package in openwhisk actions / IBM Cloud Functions

Question

I am new to OpenWhisk / IBM Cloud Functions. I was trying to build a basic chat bot application using IBM Watson Assistant. So what I have is a cloud functions action which is being invoked from my Node.js server, the action has all the credentials to interact with the Watson service, I am using "watson-developer-cloud" npm package as a dependency. Everything works as expected when I am run on local machine, however, when I zip the directory and upload it as an OpenWhisk web action it is not able to install the dependencies.

The procedure I followed is:

1. run npm install
2. compress all the files within the current directory (including node_modules)
3. upload action using the following command
   bx wsk action create chataction --kind nodejs:8 chatactionzip.zip
   (here chatactionzip is the compressed file name).

Can anyone help me get this working? I am uploading the screenshots of the directory structure.

package.json is like this

`

{
  "name": "chataction",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "app.js",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "node app.js"
  },
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "watson-developer-cloud": "^3.13.0"
  }
}

`

this is my code (i am removing some credentials rest is as it is) `

const AssistantV1 = require('watson-developer-cloud/assistant/v1');

function main(params) {

    var inputText = params.inputText || 'input was not sent';
    //return {result: inputText}
    var assistant = new AssistantV1({
        username: '',
        password: '',
        url: '',
        //api_key: '',
        version: '2018-11-26'
    });

    var inputMessageParams = {
        input: {
            text: inputText
        },
        workspace_id: ''
    }


    assistant.message(inputMessageParams, function(err, result, response) {
        if(err) {
            console.log(err);
            return {err: err}
        }
        else {
            // console.log(response);
            // console.log(response.body.output.text);
            // console.log(response.data);
            return {result: response.body.output.text[0]}
        }
    });

    //return {notHit: 'npm not working'}
}

exports.main = main;

`

invoking code is like this `

const openwhisk = require('openwhisk');

options = {
    apihost: 'openwhisk.eu-gb.bluemix.net',
    api_key: ''
}

var ow =  openwhisk(options);
var params = {inputText: 'Hello'}
var name = 'chataction';
var blocking = true;
var result = true;
ow.actions.invoke({name, blocking, result, params})
.then((result) => {
    console.log(result);
});

`

Answer 1

Serverless Actions are async, you need to wrap your code in a Promise or use try/catch if the API your using already returning a Promise

You main function is ending before your method assistant.message() call is done

    return new Promise((resolve, reject) =>{
       assistant.message(inputMessageParams, function(err, result, response) {
          if(err) {
            console.log(err);
            reject({err: err})
         }
         else {
           // console.log(response);
           // console.log(response.body.output.text);
           // console.log(response.data);
           resolve( {result: response.body.output.text[0]})
         }
       });
    });

More info on asynchronous javascript in the docs here: https://console.bluemix.net/docs/openwhisk/openwhisk_reference.html#openwhisk_ref_javascript