Developing a Web Application with Netlify Serverless Functions and MongoDB

As I mentioned in a previous tutorial, I’m a big fan of Netlify and the services they offer developers—my favorite of their services being their static website hosting and serverless functions. When combining the two, you can deploy a complex website or web application with a back end, without ever worrying about infrastructure or potentially complex API design.

So how does that work with a database like MongoDB?

If you’ve ever dabbled with serverless functions before, you might be aware that they are not always available for consumption. Many serverless functions exist for a defined amount of time and then are shut down until they are executed again. With this in mind, the connection to a database might not always be available like it would be in an application built with Express Framework, for example. You could establish a connection every time a function is called, but then you risk too many connections, which might overload your database.

So what do you do?

In this tutorial, we’re going to see how to build and deploy a simple web application using Netlify Functions and MongoDB Atlas. For this particular tutorial, we’ll be using the Node.js driver for MongoDB, but both Netlify and MongoDB support the use of other languages and drivers as well.

Add a Comments Section to an Eleventy Website with MongoDB and Netlify

I’m a huge fan of static generated websites! From a personal level, I have The Polyglot Developer, Poké Trainer Nic, and The Tracy Developer Meetup, all three of which are static generated websites built with either Hugo or Eleventy. In addition to being static generated, all three are hosted on Netlify.

I didn’t start with a static generator though. I started on WordPress, so when I made the switch to static HTML, I got a lot of benefits, but I ended up with one big loss. The comments of my site, which were once stored in a database and loaded on-demand, didn’t have a home.

Fast forward to now, we have options!

In this tutorial, we’re going to look at maintaining a static generated website on Netlify with Eleventy, but the big thing here is that we’re going to see how to have comments for each of our blog pages.