Serverless Develop Plugin

Deploy your functions to AWS Lambda as you code and get realtime feedback.

What is this?

Right now, unpolished PoC.

What problem does it solve?

Iterating with Serverless Framework is slow.

Plugins like serverless-offline or emulator try to solve that problem by Emulating AWS Lambda environment locally. That solution is far from perfect because of different container, different environment, different IAM roles etc. etc. - Inconsistency.

This plugin, instead of running Lambdas offline, deploys your code to AWS Lambda as you type, in realtime. Welcome back to 2000's, where PHP FTP deployments were made every time CMD+S was hit.

Installation

1. Run npm install serverless-develop --save
2. Add serverless-develop to your serverless.yml plugins section:

plugins:
  - serverless-develop

3. Run serverless develop

Configuration

serverless-develop can be configured by changing following variables in serverless.yml file.

custom:
  develop:
    middleware:
      - npm run build    # Runs `npm run build` before packaging
    buildPath: build     # Packages files from `build` directory
    sourcePath: src      # Points to source files directory
    changeInterval: 0.2  # Specifies max amount of seconds between deployments
    verbose: true        # Adds much more information what happens under the hood

How does it work?

First, plugin builds individual artifacts, one for each function. Then, once a change is applied, plugin checks which functions are affected. Then it patches archives located in .serverless directory and re-deploys them to AWS Lambda without updating CloudFormation or performing checks.

Examples:

• Basic
• With Babel build pipeline

Credits and inspiration

Heavily inspired by @keithwhor's article and @mthenw thoughts.