m3brown/lambdas-all-the-way-down

Lambdas All The Way Down

A sample web app that makes a word cloud of animal baby names (kitten, pup, etc.)

• The web app implements a couple examples of Python's lambda functions.
• The instructions also provide guidance on deploying to Amazon's Lambda service.

Technology stack

• Python (2 or 3 will work, 2.7 or 3.6 required for AWS Lambda)
• Flask
• JQCloud jquery library for generating the word cloud

Dependencies

• Python
• pip
• virtualenv

Installation

git clone https://github.com/m3brown/lambdas-all-the-way-down
cd lambdas-all-the-way-down
virtualenv venv
source venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt
python app.py

Using the app

Open the following URL to see the default page: http://localhost:5000/

The app also accepts overrides for preferred animal name and suffx:

• http://localhost:5000/polliwog
• http://localhost:5000/cub/scout

Deploying to AWS Lambda

To deploy to AWS Lambda, you'll need an AWS account with keypair credentials available in your environment. Place your credentials in the ~/.aws/credentials directory:

[default]
aws_access_key_id = your-access-key-here
aws_secret_access_key = your-secret-access-key-here

Next, you'll want to install the Zappa python library.

pip install zappa

Initializing zappa creates a settings file zappa_settings.json, which auto-detects the Flask app configuration.

zappa init

Next, deploy the app to Lambda dev environment:

zappa deploy

After answering all the prompts (the defaults should be fine) the deployment will provide a URL that you can use immediately.