A guide on deploying an AWS Lambda function using Claudia.js

This repository is a starting point to using Claudia as a deployment utility for AWS Lambda.

What is Claudia?

Claudia makes it easy to deploy Node.js projects to AWS Lambda and API Gateway. It automates away all those error-prone deployment and configuration tasks.

Simply:

• Claudia helps easily deploy functions to AWS Lambda
• Claudia API Builder simplifies web routing

What is AWS Lambda?

AWS Lambda is a serverless platform on Amazon Web Services. AWS Lambda allows you to build services as independent units where you only pay for the time it takes to run the operations in the Lambda function.

AWS Lambda allows you to focus on your business logic and not worry about:

• Security and networking
• VPC instances
• EC2 instances
• Security groups
• Load balancing

What does Claudia solve?

Claudia is a convenience deployment utility where you create and upload an AWS Lambda function via the command line in addition to configuring an API Gateway for load balancing using the claudia-api-builder package.

Step 0: Store your AWS credentials locally

Cluadia requires your AWS credentials to be stored on your local filesystem.

• Visit Amazon's AWS configuration guide to create and store your credentials on your local drive.

Install all the packages

Install Claudia to your global path

npm install -g claudia

Install AWS cli

pip install awscli

(Optional) Install jq for JSON pretty printing

brew install jq

Sample function

This sample application takes advantage of the ticketmaster npm module.

• Create a ticketmaster developer account to obtain an API key.

Create a new folder, initialize npm, and install the npm module for your microservice:

mkdir concerts
npm init
touch index.js
npm install claudia-api-builder ticketmaster

Open the concerts folder in your favorite code editor.

Paste the following into index.js

'use strict'

const ticketmaster = require('ticketmaster');
const API = require('claudia-api-builder');
const api = new API();

api.get('/concerts/{artist}', (request) => {
    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        ticketmaster('YOUR_TICKETMASTER_API_KEY_HERE').discovery.v2.event.all({
                keyword: request.pathParams.artist
            })
            .then(results => {
                let tours = [];
                results.items.forEach(tour => {
                    tours.push({
                        name: tour.name,
                        timezone: tour.dates.timezone,
                        url: tour.url
                    });
                });
                resolve(tours);
            });
    });
});

module.exports = api;

• Replace YOUR_TICKETMASTER_API_KEY_HERE with your API Key found in your ticketmaster developer account.
• Save

Deploying to AWS

Type the following in a command line:

claudia create --region us-west-2 --api-module index

Where --region is the AWS region to deploy to and --api-module is the name of the starting point file of your Lambda function.

Retrieve events from your newly deployed AWS service

Let's test our newly deployed AWS Lambda function by piping our output through jq

curl https://{{YOUR_LAMBDA_URL}}/concerts/creed | jq

Output:

 [ {
    "name": "Creed Bratton From the Office",
    "timezone": "America/Edmonton",
    "url": "https://www.ticketweb.ca/event/creed-bratton-from-the-office-union-hall-tickets/8610875?REFERRAL_ID=tmfeed"
  },
  {
    "name": "Creed Bratton (From NBC's the Office)",
    "timezone": "America/New_York",
    "url": "https://www.ticketweb.com/event/creed-bratton-from-nbcs-the-middle-east--downstairs-tickets/8619495?REFERRAL_ID=tmfeed"
  },
  {
    "name": "An Evening of Music & Comedy with Creed Bratton",
    "timezone": "America/New_York",
    "url": "https://www.ticketweb.com/event/an-evening-of-music-dingbatz-tickets/8628535?REFERRAL_ID=tmfeed"
  }
]

Summary

Claudia makes it easy to deploy Node.js projects to AWS Lambda and API Gateway. You can learn more by visiting claudiajs.com or Claudia's GitHub repository.