nginx

Nginx example

A basic Nginx web server runs inside AWS Lambda.

You can package this web server into Docker image, push to ECR, and deploy to Lambda, ECS/EKS, or EC2.

The application can be deployed in an AWS account using the Serverless Application Model. The template.yaml file in the root folder contains the application definition.

The top level folder is a typical AWS SAM project. The app directory is the nginx configuration with a Dockerfile.

FROM public.ecr.aws/awsguru/nginx:1.23.2023.3.11.1

COPY --from=public.ecr.aws/awsguru/aws-lambda-adapter:0.8.4 /lambda-adapter /opt/extensions/lambda-adapter

# config files
ADD nginx/conf/nginx.conf /opt/nginx/conf/nginx.conf

# code files
COPY app /var/task/

EXPOSE 8080

Line 3 copies Lambda adapter binary into /opt/extensions. This is the main change to run the Nginx server on Lambda.

COPY --from=public.ecr.aws/awsguru/aws-lambda-adapter:0.8.4 /lambda-adapter /opt/extensions/lambda-adapter

Pre-requisites

The following tools should be installed and configured.

• AWS CLI
• SAM CLI
• Docker

Deploy to Lambda

Navigate to the sample's folder and use the SAM CLI to build a container image

$ sam build

This command compiles the application and prepares a deployment package in the .aws-sam sub-directory.

To deploy the application in your AWS account, you can use the SAM CLI's guided deployment process and follow the instructions on the screen

$ sam deploy --guided

Please take note of the container image name. Once the deployment is completed, the SAM CLI will print out the stack's outputs, including the new application URL. You can use curl or a web browser to make a call to the URL

...
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OutputKey-Description                        OutputValue
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
URL for application                          https://xxxxxxxxxx.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
...

$ curl https://xxxxxxxxxx.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/

Lambda Adapter also automatic encode/decode binary data for you. Open the output link in your browser, add " images/space.jpeg" to the url, you will see a picture of the space.

https://xxxxxxxxxx.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/images/space.jpeg

Run the docker locally

We can run the same docker image locally, so that we know it can be deployed to ECS Fargate and EKS EC2 without code changes.

$ docker run -d -p 8080:8080 {ECR Image}

Use curl to verify the docker container works.

$ curl localhost:8080/