App Platform Functions experience, painful

Having used other platform serverless functions, I thought it would be straightforward enough, instead I found a painful and frustrating experience.

First, I don’t have a gitlab/github account, I use BitBucket (for work), not the end of the world so I signed up on Github.

Error handling, thought I could just check the logs of the function, nope. They’re empty. Read something about you don’t get logs from functions in an App? But my function has to be in an app as I was planning on connecting to a managed DB instance using trusted sources. So I signed up to another service, LogTail, set it up and still no events in LogTail, is the log forwarding connection even working? Would have been nice if there was a ‘test’ button or some sort of feedback that it was working. What should even be logged?

The only hint you get that something is wrong when you run your function is,

{
  "code": “a6a0f5d21783f7b14cba49dbf29170ed",
  "error": "There was an error processing your request."
}

Excellent. Very helpful. No event in LogTail either, which might not be working. I might have set it up wrong, but who is to know?

So I debug by commenting out code, pushing to git, waiting, refreshing, in a rapid cycle to debug issues, going completely mad.

After 2 days I’ve just discovered that if I deploy the ca-certificate.crt file from the managed DB instance in my function package, you get the dreaded ‘There was an error processing your request.’ . I’m sure there is a good reason for this, it isn’t obvious, just more trial and error to find this out.

All in all, having used DO for quite a few years now (and other platforms), the functions experience feels very beta. If I was to continue, I am going to have to rely on never having any issues, because if I get the “There was an error processing your request.” I’m doomed with no chance of debugging.

I really hope I’m missing some step somewhere.