Pure Lambda Functions

Chalice provides abstractions over AWS Lambda functions, including:

  • An API handler that coordinates with API Gateway for creating rest APIs.

  • A custom authorizer that allows you to integrate custom auth logic in your rest API.

  • A scheduled event that includes managing the CloudWatch Event rules, targets, and permissions.

However, chalice also supports managing pure Lambda functions that don’t have any abstractions built on top. This is useful if you want to create a Lambda function for something that’s not supported by chalice or if you just want to create Lambda functions but don’t want to manage handling dependencies and deployments yourself.

In order to do this, you can use the Chalice.lambda_function() decorator to denote that this python function is a pure lambda function that should be invoked as is, without any input or output mapping. When you use this function, you must provide a function that maps to the same function signature expected by AWS Lambda as defined here.

Let’s look at an example.

app = chalice.Chalice(app_name='foo')

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

@app.lambda_function()
def custom_lambda_function(event, context):
    # Anything you want here.
    return {}

@app.lambda_function(name='MyFunction')
def other_lambda_function(event, context):
    # Anything you want here.
    return {}

In this example, we’ve updated the starter hello world app with two extra Lambda functions. When you run chalice deploy Chalice will create three Lambda functions. The first lambda function is for the API handler used by API gateway. The second and third lambda functions will be pure lambda functions. These two additional lambda functions won’t be hooked up to anything. You’ll need to manage connecting them to any additional AWS Resources on your own.

Blueprints →