Build a Serverless Leaderboard API At Edge using Cloudflare Workers and Redis

With edge functions, it is possible to run your backend at the closest location to your users. Cloudflare Workers and Fastly Compute@Edge runs your function at the closest location to your user using their CDN infrastructure.

In this article we will implement a very common web use case at Edge. We will implement a leaderboard API without any backend servers, containers or even serverless functions. We will just use edge functions. Leaderboard will have the following APIs:

• addScore: Adds a score with the player's name. This will write the score to the Upstash Redis directly from the Edge functions.
• getLeaderBoard: Returns the list of score-player pairs. This call will first check the Edge cache. If the leaderboard does not exist at the Edge Cache then it will fetch it from the Upstash Redis.

Project Setup

In this tutorial, we will use Cloudflare Workers and Upstash. You can create a free database from Upstash Console. Then create a Workers project using Wrangler.

Install wrangler: npm install -g @cloudflare/wrangler

Authenticate: wrangler login or wrangler config

Then create a project: wrangler generate edge-leaderboard

Open wrangler.toml. Run wrangler whoami and copy/paste your account id to your wrangler.toml.

Find your REST token from database details page in the Upstash Console. Copy/paste your token to your wrangler toml as below:

name = "edge-leaderboard"
type = "javascript"

account_id = "REPLACE_YOUR_ACCOUNT_ID"
workers_dev = true
route = ""
zone_id = ""

[vars]
TOKEN = "REPLACE_YOUR_UPSTASH_REST_TOKEN"

The Code

The only file we need is the Workers Edge function. Update the index.js as below:

addEventListener("fetch", event => {
 event.respondWith(handleRequest(event.request))
})

async function handleRequest(request) {
 if (request.method === "GET") {
   return getLeaderboard();
 } else if (request.method === "POST") {
   return addScore(request);
 } else {
   return new Response("Invalid Request!")
 }
}

async function getLeaderboard() {
 let url = "https://us1-full-bug-31874.upstash.io/zrevrange/scores/0/1000/WITHSCORES/?_token=" + TOKEN;
 let res = await fetch(new Request(url),
   {
     cf:
       {
         cacheTtl: 10,
         cacheEverything: true,
         cacheKey: url,
       },
   }
 )
 return res;
}

async function addScore(request) {
 const { searchParams } = new URL(request.url)
 let player = searchParams.get('player')
 let score = searchParams.get('score')
 let url = "https://us1-full-bug-31874.upstash.io/zadd/scores/" + score + "/"  + player + "?_token=" + TOKEN;
 let res = await fetch(url)
 return new Response(await res.text())
}

We route the request to two methods: if it is a GET, we return the leaderboard. If it is a POST, we read the query parameters and add a new score.

In the getLeaderboard() method, you will see we pass a cache configuration to the fetch() method. It caches the result of the request at the Edge for 10 seconds.

Test The API

In your project folder run wrangler dev. It will give you a local URL. You can test your API with curl:

Add new scores:

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8787\?player\=messi\&score\=13

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8787\?player\=ronaldo\&score\=17

curl -X POST http://127.0.0.1:8787\?player\=benzema\&score\=18

Get the leaderboard:

curl -w '\n Latency: %{time_total}s\n' http://127.0.0.1:8787

Call the “curl -w '\n Total: %{time_total}s\n' http://127.0.0.1:8787” multiple times. You will see the latency becomes very small with the next calls as the cached result comes from the edge.

If you wait more than 10 seconds then you will see the latency becomes higher as the cache is evicted and the function fetches the leaderboard from the Upstash Redis again.

Deploy The API

First change the type in the wrangler.toml to webpack

name = "edge-leaderboard"
type = "webpack"

Then, run wrangler publish. Wrangler will output the URL. If you want to deploy to a custom domain see here.

Coming Soon: Built in Edge Caching

In this example, we have used Cloudflare Cache to cache the Redis result at the edge. Soon, Upstash will provide a separate REST URL which will be cached at the Edge by default. So Upstash users will be able to access Edge caching in all environments.