By default, AWS Lambda only supports a specific version of JavaScript. It doesn’t have an up-to-date Node.js engine. And looking a bit further ahead, we’ll be using a more advanced flavor of JavaScript with ES6/ES7 features. So it would make sense to follow the same syntax on the backend and have a transpiler convert it to the target syntax. This would mean that we won’t need to worry about writing different types of code on the backend or the frontend.

In this chapter, we are going to enable ES6/ES7 for AWS Lambda using the Serverless Framework. We will do this by setting up Babel and Webpack to transpile and package our project. If you would like to code with AWS Lambda’s default JavaScript version, you can skip this chapter. But you will not be able to directly use the sample code in the later chapters, as they are written in ES6 syntax.

Install Babel and Webpack

At the root of the project, run.

$ npm install --save-dev \
    babel-core \
    babel-loader \
    babel-plugin-transform-runtime \
    babel-preset-env \
    babel-preset-stage-3 \
    serverless-webpack \
    webpack@3.11.0 \
    webpack-node-externals@1.6.0

$ npm install --save babel-runtime

Most of the above packages are only needed while we are building our project and they won’t be deployed to our Lambda functions. We are using the serverless-webpack plugin to help trigger the Webpack build when we run our Serverless commands. The webpack-node-externals is necessary because we do not want Webpack to bundle our aws-sdk module, since it is not compatible.

Create a file called webpack.config.js in the root with the following.

const slsw = require("serverless-webpack");
const nodeExternals = require("webpack-node-externals");

module.exports = {
  entry: slsw.lib.entries,
  target: "node",
  // Since 'aws-sdk' is not compatible with webpack,
  // we exclude all node dependencies
  externals: [nodeExternals()],
  // Run babel on all .js files and skip those in node_modules
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.js$/,
        loader: "babel-loader",
        include: __dirname,
        exclude: /node_modules/
      }
    ]
  }
};

This is the configuration Webpack will use to package our app. The main part of this config is the entry attribute that we are automatically generating using the slsw.lib.entries that is a part of the serverless-webpack plugin. This automatically picks up all our handler functions and packages them (we expand on this config at the end of our guide to make it a bit easier to use).

Next create a file called .babelrc in the root with the following.

{
  "plugins": ["transform-runtime"],
  "presets": ["env", "stage-3"]
}

The presets are telling Babel the type of JavaScript we are going to be using.

Open serverless.yml and replace it with the following.

service: notes-app-api

# Use serverless-webpack plugin to transpile ES6/ES7
plugins:
  - serverless-webpack

# Enable auto-packing of external modules
custom:
  webpackIncludeModules: true

provider:
  name: aws
  runtime: nodejs6.10
  stage: prod
  region: us-east-1

And now we are ready to build our backend.