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Postlight's Modern Serverless Starter Kit adds a light layer on top of the Serverless framework, giving you the latest in modern JavaScript (ES6 via Webpack + Babel, TypeScript (but only if you want it), testing with Jest, linting with ESLint, and formatting with Prettier), the ease and power of Serverless, and a few handy helpers (like functions for handling warm functions and response helpers).

Once installed, you can create and deploy functions with the latest ES6 features in minutes, with linting and formatting baked in.

Read more about it in this handy introduction.

Note: Currently, this starter kit specifically targets AWS.

# If you don't already have the serverless cli installed, do that
yarn global add serverless

# Use the serverless cli to install this repo
serverless install --url https://github.com/postlight/serverless-babel-starter --name <your-service-name>

# cd into project and set it up
cd <your-service-name>

# Install dependencies
yarn install

Creating and deploying a new function takes two steps, which you can see in action with this repo's default Hello World function (if you're already familiar with Serverless, you're probably familiar with these steps).

In the functions section of ./serverless.yml, you have to add your new function like so:

functions:
  hello:
    handler: src/hello.default
    events:
      - http:
          path: hello
          method: get
      # Ping every 5 minutes to avoid cold starts
      - schedule:
          rate: rate(5 minutes)
          enabled: true

Ignoring the scheduling event, you can see here that we're setting up a function named hello with a handler at src/hello.js (the .default piece is just indicating that the function to run will be the default export from that file). The http event says that this function will run when an http event is triggered (on AWS, this happens via API Gateway).

This starter kit's Hello World function (which you will of course get rid of) can be found at ./src/hello.js. There you can see a basic function that's intended to work in conjunction with API Gateway (i.e., it is web-accessible). Like most Serverless functions, the hello function accepts an event, context, and callback. When your function is completed, you execute the callback with your response. (This is all basic Serverless; if you've never used it, be sure to read through their docs.

You can develop and test your lambda functions locally in a few different ways.

To run the hello function with the event data defined in fixtures/event.json (with live reloading), run:

yarn watch:hello

To spin up a local dev server that will more closely match the API Gateway endpoint/experience:

yarn serve

Jest is installed as the testrunner. To create a test, co-locate your test with the file it's testing as <filename>.test.js and then run/watch tests with:

yarn test

When you add a new function to your serverless config, you don't need to also add it as a new entry for Webpack. The serverless-webpack plugin allows us to follow a simple convention in our serverless.yml file which is uses to automatically resolve your function handlers to the appropriate file:

functions:
  hello:
    handler: src/hello.default

As you can see, the path to the file with the function has to explicitly say where the handler file is. (If your function weren't the default export of that file, you'd do something like: src/hello.namedExport instead.)

Lambda functions will go "cold" if they haven't been invoked for a certain period of time (estimates vary, and AWS doesn't offer a clear answer). From the Serverless blog:

Cold start happens when you execute an inactive (cold) function for the first time. It occurs while your cloud provider provisions your selected runtime container and then runs your function. This process, referred to as cold start, will increase your execution time considerably.

A frequently running function won't have this problem, but you can keep your function running hot by scheduling a regular ping to your lambda function. Here's what that looks like in your serverless.yml:

functions:
  myFunc:
    handler: src/myFunc.default
    timeout: 10
    memorySize: 256
    events:
      # ...other config happening up here and then...
      # Ping every 5 minutes to avoid cold starts
      - schedule:
          rate: rate(5 minutes)
          enabled: true

Your handler function can then handle this event like so:

const myFunc = (event, context, callback) => {
  // Detect the keep-alive ping from CloudWatch and exit early. This keeps our
  // lambda function running hot.
  if (event.source === "aws.events") {
    // aws.events is the source for Scheduled events
    return callback(null, "pinged");
  }

  // ... the rest of your function
};

export default myFunc;

Copying and pasting the above can be tedious, so we've added a higher order function to wrap your run-warm functions. You still need to config the ping in your serverless.yml file; then your function should look like this:

import runWarm from "./utils";

const myFunc = (event, context, callback) => {
  // Your function logic
};

export default runWarm(myFunc);

Assuming you've already set up your default AWS credentials (or have set a different AWS profile via the profile field):

yarn deploy

yarn deploy will deploy to "dev" environment. You can deploy to stage or production with:

yarn deploy:stage

# -- or --

yarn deploy:production

After you've deployed, the output of the deploy script will give you the API endpoint for your deployed function(s), so you should be able to test the deployed API via that URL.