Serverless Framework Guide — AWS Lambda Guide — Packaging

Using the Serverless CLI tool, you can package your project without deploying it to AWS. This is best used with CI / CD workflows to ensure consistent deployable artifacts.

Running the following command will build and save all of the deployment artifacts in the service’s .serverless directory:

serverless package

However, you can also use the — package option to add a destination path and Serverless will store your deployment artifacts there (../my-artifacts in the following case):

serverless package --package my-artifacts

#Package Configuration

Sometimes you might like to have more control over your function artifacts and how they are packaged.

You can use the package and exclude configuration for more control over the packaging process.

#Exclude / include

Exclude and include allows you to define globs that will be excluded / included from the resulting artifact. If you wish to include files you can use a glob pattern prefixed with ! such as !re-include-me/** in exclude or the dedicated include config. Serverless will run the glob patterns in order.

At first it will apply the globs defined in exclude. After that it'll add all the globs from include. This way you can always re-include previously excluded files and directories.

#Examples

Exclude all node_modules but then re-include a specific modules (in this case node-fetch) using exclude exclusively

package:  exclude:  - node_modules/**  - '!node_modules/node-fetch/**'

Exclude all files but handler.js using exclude and include

package:  exclude:  - src/**  include:  - src/function/handler.js

Note: Don’t forget to use the correct glob syntax if you want to exclude directories

exclude: - tmp/** - .git/**

#Artifact

For complete control over the packaging process you can specify your own artifact zip file. Serverless won’t zip your service if this is configured and therefore exclude and include will be ignored. Either you use artifact or include / exclude.

The artifact option is especially useful in case your development environment allows you to generate a deployable artifact like Maven does for Java.

#Example

service: my-service package:  artifact: path/to/my-artifact.zip

#Packaging functions separately

If you want even more controls over your functions for deployment you can configure them to be packaged independently. This allows you more control for optimizing your deployment. To enable individual packaging set individually to true in the service or function wide packaging settings.

Then for every function you can use the same exclude, include or artifact config options as you can service wide. The exclude and include option will be merged with the service wide options to create one exclude and include config per function during packaging.

service: my-service package:  individually: true  exclude:  - excluded-by-default.json functions:  hello:  handler: handler.hello  package:  include:  - excluded-by-default.json  world:  handler: handler.hello  package:  exclude:  - some-file.js

You can also select which functions to be packaged separately, and have the rest use the service package by setting the individually flag at the function level:

service: my-service functions:  hello:  handler: handler.hello  world:  handler: handler.hello  package:  individually: true

#Development dependencies

Serverless will auto-detect and exclude development dependencies based on the runtime your service is using.

This ensures that only the production relevant packages and modules are included in your zip file. Doing this drastically reduces the overall size of the deployment package which will be uploaded to the cloud provider.

You can opt-out of automatic dev dependency exclusion by setting the excludeDevDependencies package config to false:

package:  excludeDevDependencies: false

Originally published at serverless.com.