Google Cloud Functions and the File System

If you want to write a cloud function, and you need to write temporary data to the file system, how do you do it?

Using /tmp. Under the hood, it's actually just storing it in memory but if you must simulate reading and writing to the file system it'll work.

I was cloning a repo programmatically and parsing JSON files from that repo, so it made sense for my situation.

To write:

func write() error {
    text := "Hello World"
    filepath := "/tmp/file"
    fmt.Printf("writing file %v\n", filepath)
    b := []byte(text)
    err := ioutil.WriteFile(filepath, b, 0644)
    switch  {
    case err != nil:
        fmt.Printf("error encountered writing file %v, %v\n", filepath, err)
        return err
    default:
        fmt.Printf("file wrote successfully\n")
        return nil
    }
}

To read:

func read() (string, error) {
    filepath := "tmp/file"
    fmt.Printf("reading file %v\n", filepath)
    content, err := ioutil.ReadFile(filepath)

    switch {
    case err != nil:
        fmt.Printf("error encountered reading file %v, %v\n", filepath, err)
        return "", err
    default:
        fmt.Printf("file %v read, content: %v\n", filepath, string(content))
        return string(content), nil
    }
}

You can find a complete sample here.

If you care about preserving the files you're writing, then don't use this solution. Instead, use something like this.