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Create an Azure Function App using a Mac

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Brenton

In this post, we’ll take a look at how you can quickly create an Azure Function when using a Mac. In particular, we’ll be using the Azure Functions command line tools to create our functions app.

Getting started

Before you can create a function, you’ll need to install the Azure Function command line tools. But before you can continue, you need to make sure that you have installed Brew. If you’re not familiar with it, Brew is a package manager for the Mac – similar to NPM for Node.Js projects.

Once you’ve installed Brew, make sure you have the latest .NET Core SDK installed. If you’re not sure, open Terminal and run:

dotnet --version

If you do get a version back, make sure it’s at least 2.0.0 or above. If you get an error, you’ll need to install it using the following Brew commands:

brew tap caskroom/caskbrew cask install dotnet

Run the same dotnet version command again to ensure the install was successful.

Now we need to install the Azure Function Core Tools:

brew tap azure/functionsbrew install azure-functions-core-tools

Once the install has finished, you’re now ready to go creating your first function!

Creating the function app

Now that we’ve got all the dependencies installed, it’s time to create our function app. Open Terminal, and navigate to a directory where you’d like your app to be created (in our case, we’re going to create it from the root Documents folder).

cd ~/Documents

Now let’s get started creating the app! First lets initialise the project:

func init MyFirstFunctionApp --source-control true --worker-runtime dotnet

This will create a folder called MyFirstFunctionApp inside your Documents folder. It will be initialised as a git repository (the source-control parameter) and have a dotnet runtime. If you’d prefer a Node.Js function or a Python function, you can replace dotnet with either node or python respectively.

You’ll now have your project – but at this point, it’ll be empty with no functions. To add your first function, we need to run the following command to generate a function called MyFirstFunction:

 func new --name MyFirstFunction

It’ll then ask you what type of template you’d like to use. A template is effectively a trigger – what will cause your function to start running? We’ll choose #2 (HttpTrigger) for now, as this will enable you to easily run your function via Curl, Postman or by visiting a page in your web browser. You can provide this in the previous command as —template, or select from the list.

You’ll now have your first function and function app created! You can run it by entering:

func start

Once it’s started, you should see the a message with the function URL, like this:

The sample function expects a name parameter to be provided, so open up your web browser and go to http://localhost:7071/api/MyFirstFunction?name=Bob. You should get a response like:

Hello, Bob

Summary

So that’s how easy it is to get started with an Azure Function app on a Mac. Microsoft has done a lot of work around the tooling to make it as straightforward as possible.