A starter boilerplate for nodeJS serverless applications.

The boilerplate provides simple examples of

• HTTP / REST functions (synchronous application logic)
• SNS functions (asynchronous or deferred application logic)
• Scheduled functions

It is meant merely as a launching point that contains some common libraries for building a serverless app on AWS.

• nodeJS: This boilerplate is written in nodeJS 8.10 and many of the plugins we're using are only available for node.
• AWS Lambda: This boilerplate assumes that you're going to deploy your serverless functions to AWS and not another cloud provider.
• Docker & Make: For building and deploying serverless functions.

Installing the project

git clone https://github.com/levinunnink/serverless-boilerplate.git
npm install

I recommend familiarizing yourself with the serverless.yml file.

HTTP functions

npm run start # Starts a local http server that you can access directly in your browser to test your http serverless functions

Triggering SNS functions

npm run sns -- functionName --data '{"a":"bar"}' # Please note the space before and after the double-dash "--"

Developing and testing AWS services locally:

If you want to use AWS services locally, you'll need to use localstack. I recommend only running the services you actually need instead of booting up the whole AWS suite. Docker runs out of memory very quickly that way. In the example docker-compose.yml you'll see that we are only running S3 and Dynamodb locally. You can modify this as you need.

docker-compose up # Boots localstack and associated services

To use these services when running your serverless app locally, you need to override the endpoint variable to point it to localstack.

const AWS = require('aws-sdk');

const s3 = new AWS.S3({
  endpoint: 'http://localhost:4572', // localstack s3 endpoint
});

The boilerplate includes two stages for deployment stage and prod. Feel free to modify these as you like but remember that serverless functions go live instantly so staged deployment and good testing are really important.

Builds are run and deployed in Docker for consistency using a special build image that mimics the Lambda nodeJS environment.

Deploy to staging:

make deploy-stage

Deploy to production:

make deploy-prod

A note about environment variables:

You'll notice references to AWS_ENV_PATH in the Makefile. This is so the aws-env library knows where to find the environment variables. These env variables map to the environment vars in the serverless.yml file.

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Author: Levi Nunnink - @levinunnink