After you finish creating a Lambda function, you want to first run it locally.

Invoking Lambda locally

Let’s take the get function defined in the serverless.yml file in the notes-api service .

functions:
  get:
    handler: get.main
    events:
      - http:
          path: notes/{id}
          method: get
          cors: true
          authorizer: aws_iam

And get.js looks like:

import handler from "../../libs/handler-lib";
import dynamoDb from "../../libs/dynamodb-lib";

export const main = handler(async (event, context) => {
  const params = {
    TableName: 'ext-notes',
    // 'Key' defines the partition key and sort key of the item to be retrieved
    // - 'userId': Identity Pool identity id of the authenticated user
    // - 'noteId': path parameter
    Key: {
      userId: event.requestContext.identity.cognitoIdentityId,
      noteId: event.pathParameters.id
    }
  };

  const result = await dynamoDb.get(params);
  if ( ! result.Item) {
    throw new Error("Item not found.");
  }

  // Return the retrieved item
  return result.Item;
});

The Lambda function is invoked by an API Gateway GET HTTP request, we need to mock the request parameters. In the events directory inside services/notes-api/, there is a mock event file called get-event.json:

{
  "pathParameters": {
    "id": "578eb840-f70f-11e6-9d1a-1359b3b22944"
  },
  "requestContext": {
    "identity": {
      "cognitoIdentityId": "USER-SUB-1234"
    }
  }
}

To invoke this function, run the following inside services/notes-api:

$ serverless invoke local -f get --path events/get-event.json

Let’s look at a couple of example HTTP event objects.

Query string parameters

To pass in a query string parameter:

{
  "queryStringParameters": {
    "key": "value"
  }
}

Post data

To pass in a HTTP body for a POST request:

{
  "body": "{\"key\":\"value\"}"
}

You can also mock the event as if the Lambda function is invoked by other events like SNS, SQS, etc. The content in the mock event file is passed into the Lambda function’s event object directly.

Distinguish locally invoked Lambda

You might want to distinguish if the Lambda function was triggered by serverless invoke local during testing. For example, you don’t want to send analytical events to your analytics server; or you don’t want to send emails. You can simply add a runtime environment variable by doing the following:

$ IS_LOCAL=true serverless invoke local -f get --path events/get-event.json

And in your code, you can check the environment variable. We use this in our libs/aws-sdk.js to disable X-Ray tracing when invoking a function locally:

import aws from "aws-sdk";
import xray from "aws-xray-sdk";

// Do not enable tracing for 'invoke local'
const awsWrapped = process.env.IS_LOCAL ? aws : xray.captureAWS(aws);

export default awsWrapped;

Next, let’s look at how we can work with API Gateway endpoints locally.