npm package to easily run arbitrary compiled binaries in your applications or AWS Lambda

I recently posted a detailed article on how to efficiently run Racket compiled native binaries on AWS Lambda, and the same process can be used for any compiled binary that runs on Amazon Linux (including binaries from languages like Go, Racket, OCaml, Rust, C/C++, etc.).

The Lambda wrapper code was very easy to understand but a bit long, and if you have lots of lambdas using binaries you might end up copy-pasting those lines, which as we know is not good. Remember the DRY principle?

As a result, to make it easier for me, and anyone implementing the solution described in that article, I created an npm package to help you reduce the boilerplate of your Lambda wrapper code significantly.

AWS-Lambda-Binary npm package

You can find the package at https://www.npmjs.com/package/aws-lambda-binary

Its usage is very easy and the package itself provides sufficient documentation of the API. In addition, couple of ready-to-upload AWS Lambda examples are provided inside the _examples folder.

In a nutshell, the following describes how to use this package to start the Linux command cat which will be used as an echo-back process.

First of all if you don’t have an existing lambda project, just create one using the following commands:

mkdir lambda-test && cd lambda-test
npm init -y

Now that you have a project, install the npm package:

npm install aws-lambda-binary

Copy and paste the following code into a file named wrapper.js.

const application = require('aws-lambda-binary').spawnLineByLine({
    spawn: { command: 'cat' }
});

exports.handler = function (event, context) {
    application.ensureIsRunning();

    application.stdout(result => context.done(null, result));

    application.stdin(JSON.stringify({event, context}));
};

Finally, prepare the zip file to upload to AWS Lambda by running the command below:

zip -r bundle.zip wrapper.js node_modules/

In the AWS Lambda console, create a new function with Runtime Node.js 6.10 (or higher), and with Handler wrapper.handler.

Upload the bundle.zip file you created above and Save and Test. The above lamba code takes the event of the lambda invocation, along with the context object which contains some metadata, serialises them into JSON string and sends them to the cat process through standard input. The process returns the result back through standard output and we successfully finish the lambda invocation passing the line of text received as the result.

There are more examples in the npm package but as you can see above, once you have all your logic into a compiled binary, starting the binary and communicating with it is a matter of ~5 lines.

Enjoy, and feel free to contribute to the package.

SEO tags: AWS, AWSLambda, binary, racket, go, ocaml, rust


October 18, 2017