Ensure you have easy_install, pip , virtualenv and postgres installed at a system level.

Ensure you have make on your system.

Ensure you have AWS credentials on your system for the frontend account.

To setup a local python environment in this context:

virtualenv .

Then change into the context of the environment with:

source bin/activate

Now you need to install the python dependencies.

pip install -r requirements.txt

Assuming you have make on your system, run

make build

This will now create a dist/ directory with the exact structure of how the lambda function should be laid out, also in here is the function.zip file that can be used to upload to lambda.