Quickstart¶

Credentials¶

Before you can deploy an application, be sure you have credentials configured. If you have previously configured your machine to run boto3 (the AWS SDK for Python) or the AWS CLI then you can skip this section.

If this is your first time configuring credentials for AWS you can follow these steps to quickly get started:

$ mkdir ~/.aws
$ cat >> ~/.aws/config
[default]
aws_access_key_id=YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_HERE
aws_secret_access_key=YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
region=YOUR_REGION (such as us-west-2, us-west-1, etc)

If you want more information on all the supported methods for configuring credentials, see the boto3 docs.

Creating Your Project¶

The next thing we’ll do is use the chalice command to create a new project:

$ chalice new-project helloworld

This will create a helloworld directory. Cd into this directory. You’ll see several files have been created for you:

$ cd helloworld
$ ls -la
drwxr-xr-x   .chalice
-rw-r--r--   app.py
-rw-r--r--   requirements.txt

You can ignore the .chalice directory for now, the two main files we’ll focus on is app.py and requirements.txt.

Let’s take a look at the app.py file:

from chalice import Chalice

app = Chalice(app_name='helloworld')


@app.route('/')
def index():
    return {'hello': 'world'}

The new-project command created a sample app that defines a single view, /, that when called will return the JSON body {"hello": "world"}.

Deploying¶

Let’s deploy this app. Make sure you’re in the helloworld directory and run chalice deploy:

$ chalice deploy
Creating deployment package.
Creating IAM role: helloworld-dev
Creating lambda function: helloworld-dev
Creating Rest API
Resources deployed:
  - Lambda ARN: arn:aws:lambda:us-west-2:12345:function:helloworld-dev
  - Rest API URL: https://abcd.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/api/

You now have an API up and running using API Gateway and Lambda:

$ curl https://qxea58oupc.execute-api.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/api/
{"hello": "world"}

Try making a change to the returned dictionary from the index() function. You can then redeploy your changes by running chalice deploy.

Cleaning Up¶

If you’re done experimenting with Chalice and you’d like to cleanup, you can use the chalice delete command, and Chalice will delete all the resources it created when running the chalice deploy command.

$ chalice delete
Deleting Rest API: abcd4kwyl4
Deleting function aws:arn:lambda:region:123456789:helloworld-dev
Deleting IAM Role helloworld-dev

Next Steps¶

At this point, there are several tutorials you can follow based on what you’re interested in:

• Creating REST APIs - Dive into more detail on how to create a REST API using Chalice. We’ll explore URL parameters, error messages, content types, CORs, and more.

• Event Sources - In this tutorial, we’ll focus on difference event sources you can connect with a Lambda function other than a REST API with Amazon API Gateway.

• Websockets - In this tutorial, we’ll show you how to create a websocket API and create a sample chat application.

You can also jump into specific topic guides. These are more detailed than the tutorials, and provide more reference style documentation on specific features of Chalice.

And finally, you can look at the API Reference for detailed API documentation for Chalice. This is useful if you know exactly what feature you’re using but need to lookup a specific parameter name or return value.