serverless-offline VS serverless-webpack

Using local emulators like sam local, serverless-offline, localstack, etc.

Hi, I'm the creator of serverless-offline (https://github.com/dherault/serverless-offline), a NPM package for local serveless development on AWS.

I'm building a cool product and intend to launch Q1 2023. To gain traction from my target customers, I plan to place a discrete ad at the launch of every serverless-offline instance.

Does it seem like an ok move to you? Or is it something that repels you?

Best,

As the creator of serverless-offline, I am well placed to tell you that this is the time-effective solution. Plus, it costs way less than other solutions at smaller scales. But, again, going Kubernetes or otherwise will be a problem for the future.

https://github.com/dherault/serverless-offline https://github.com/lambci/docker-lambda

What if I didn’t need to push code to AWS every time I wanted to test something? All heroes don’t wear capes. Like a knight in shining armor, Serverless Offline comes barging in to save the day! At least now I can test all my code locally before pushing it to AWS. That’s a relief.

With classic Express servers, you can use a simple node script to get the server up and running to test locally. Serverless wants to be run in the AWS ecosystem making it. Lucky for us, David Hérault has built and continues to maintain serverless-offline allowing us to emulate our functions locally before we deploy.

With the serverless offline plugin you can speed up local dev is by emulating AWS lambda and API Gateway locally when developing your Serverless project.

Those mocks are by definition not real services so there are some behavior differences between the local environment and the cloud provider. For example, AWS API Gateway emulated by serverless-offline doesn't handle VTL locally the same as AWS does.

serverless-offline (https://github.com/dherault/serverless-offline) is a great tool to use for local development of serverless applications.

It's not a complete mirror image of what you get but it's close enough in my experience.

Since I was using serverless-webpack along with Prisma's serverless-webpack-prisma helper, this meant a bit of extra Webpack config setup to get it all using the same module syntax without the usual dreaded 'Unexpected token export' or import error from Node.

As you can see in the above handler.js file, we're getting CommonJS instead of modern JavaScript or TypeScript. To get these, you need webpack or some other bundler. serverless-webpack exists if you want full control over your ecosystem, but there is also serverless-bundle that gives you a set of reasonable defaults on webpack 4 out of the box. We opted into this option to get us started quickly.

cd app-backend/dynamodb yarn install To test the GraphQL endpoint locally on my machine, I’m using these three plugins for the Serverless Framework: Serverless Offline, Serverless Webpack and Serverless DynamoDB Local.

Serverless Webpack

The serverless framework supports an excellent workflow with the serverless-webpack plugin to package your functions individually with webpack. For AWS SAM, it's probably worth checking out the aws-sam-webpack-plugin, but I've found it far simpler to configure esbuild to perform the same task.