A small library to simplify running lambdas written in crystallang. Not production ready, just an evening hack!

You can include this as a dependency in your project in shards.yml file

dependencies:
  lambda_builder:
    github: spinscale/crystal-aws-lambda
    branch: main

Now run the the shards command to download the dependency. You can now create your own lambda handlers like this

require "lambda_builder"

runtime = Lambda::Builder::Runtime.new

runtime.register_handler("httpevent") do |input|
  req = Lambda::Builder::HTTPRequest.new(input)
  user = req.query_params.fetch("hello", "World")
  response = Lambda::Builder::HTTPResponse.new(200, "Hello #{user} from Crystal")
  # not super efficient, serializing to JSON string and then parsing, simplify this
  JSON.parse response.to_json
end

runtime.register_handler("scheduledevent") do |input|
  runtime.logger.debug("Hello from scheduled event, input: #{input}")
  JSON.parse "{}"
end

runtime.register_handler("snsevent") do |input|
  runtime.logger.info("SNSEvent input: #{input}")
  JSON.parse "{}"
end

runtime.run

The input variable is of type JSON::Any and represents the JSON handed over by the lambda event.

There is a helper class to create a HTTP request from the input, no need to do that manually.

Make sure the serverless framework is set up properly. The next step is to create a proper serverless configuration file like this

service: crystal-hello-world

provider:
  name: aws
  runtime: provided

package:
  artifact: ./bootstrap.zip

functions:
  httpevent:
    handler: httpevent
    events:
      - http:
          memorySize: 128
          path: hello
          method: get

  snsevent:
    handler: snsevent
    memorySize: 128
    events:
      - sns: my-sns-topic

  scheduledevent:
    handler: scheduledevent
    memorySize: 128
    events:
      - schedule:
          rate: rate(10 minutes)
          input:
            hello: world

If you are using osx, make sure you are building your app using docker, as an AWS lambda runtime environment is based on Linux. You can create a linux binary using docker like this

docker run --rm -it -v $PWD:/app -w /app crystallang/crystal:latest crystal build src/bootstrap.cr -o bin/bootstrap --release --static --no-debug

Now package the zip file required for deployment and deploy

zip -j bootstrap.zip bin/bootstrap
sls deploy

In order to monitor executions you can check the corresponding function logs like this

sls logs -f httpevent -t
sls logs -f snsevent -t
sls logs -f scheduledevent -t

you can also get some very simple metrics per functions (this might require additional permissions)

sls metrics -f httpevent
sls metrics -f snsevent
sls metrics -f scheduledevent

While often it's easy to compile with just static linking on a host system like Alpine, sometimes it's more convenient to deploy a dynamically linked binary. To do this, all the required linked dependencies have to be copied into the zip file. The binary itself needs to be modified using patchelf to find them too.

The required libraries can be obtained automatically using ldd bin/bootstrap. An example build and packaging process looks like this:

shards build --release bootstrap
mkdir -p build/lib

# copy the main binary
cp bin/bootstrap build

# copy the libraries
cp $(ldd bin/bootstrap | awk '/ => / {print $3}') build/lib
# copy the loader
cp /lib64/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 build/lib
# update the library lookup paths to use ./lib rather than the system copies
patchelf --set-interpreter ./lib/ld-linux-x86-64.so.2 --set-rpath ./lib --force-rpath build/bootstrap

# zip it all up for deployment
(cd build && zip -r ../bootstrap.zip *)

If you want to get up and running with an example, run the following commands

git clone https://github.com/spinscale/crystal-aws-lambda
cd crystal-aws-lambda/example
# download dependencies
shards
# built binary (using docker under osx) and creates the zip file
make
# deploy to AWS, requires the serverless tool to be properly set up
sls deploy

This will start a sample runtime, that includes a HTTP endpoint, a scheduled event and an SQS listening event.

1. Fork it (https://github.com/spinscale/crystal-aws-lambda/fork)
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature'), also run bin/ameba
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create a new Pull Request
6. Don't forget to add proper tests, if possible

• Alexander Reelsen - creator and maintainer