Based on what we have gone through in this guide, it makes sense that we have a good starting point for our future projects. For this we created a couple of Serverless starter projects that you can use called, Serverless Node.js Starter. We also have a Python version called Serverless Python Starter. Our starter projects also work really well with Seed; a fully-configured CI/CD pipeline for Serverless Framework.

Serverless Node.js Starter uses the serverless-bundle plugin (an extension of the serverless-webpack plugin) and the serverless-offline plugin. It supports:

  • Generating optimized Lambda packages with Webpack
  • Use ES7 syntax in your handler functions
  • Run API Gateway locally
    • Use serverless offline start
  • Support for unit tests
    • Run npm test to run your tests
  • Sourcemaps for proper error messages
    • Error message show the correct line numbers
    • Works in production with CloudWatch
  • Add environment variables for your stages
  • No need to manage Webpack or Babel configs

Demo

A demo version of this service is hosted on AWS - https://z6pv80ao4l.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/hello.

And here is the ES7 source behind it.

export const hello = async (event, context, callback) => {
  const response = {
    statusCode: 200,
    body: JSON.stringify({
      message: `Go Serverless v1.0! ${(await message({ time: 1, copy: 'Your function executed successfully!'}))}`,
      input: event,
    }),
  };

  callback(null, response);
};

const message = ({ time, ...rest }) => new Promise((resolve, reject) => 
  setTimeout(() => {
    resolve(`${rest.copy} (with a delay)`);
  }, time * 1000)
);

Requirements

Installation

To create a new Serverless project.

$ serverless install --url https://github.com/AnomalyInnovations/serverless-nodejs-starter --name my-project

Enter the new directory.

$ cd my-project

Install the Node.js packages.

$ npm install

Usage

To run a function on your local

$ serverless invoke local --function hello

To simulate API Gateway locally using serverless-offline

$ serverless offline start

Run your tests

$ npm test

We use Jest to run our tests. You can read more about setting up your tests here.

Deploy your project

$ serverless deploy

Deploy a single function

$ serverless deploy function --function hello

To add environment variables to your project

  1. Rename env.example to .env.
  2. Add environment variables for your local stage to .env.
  3. Uncomment environment: block in the serverless.yml and reference the environment variable as ${env:MY_ENV_VAR}. Where MY_ENV_VAR is added to your .env file.
  4. Make sure to not commit your .env.

So give it a try and send us an email if you have any questions or open a new issue if you’ve found a bug.