Express Template

Outline

An Express Site using Handlebars templates on AWS API Gateway behind Cloudfront.

Setup & Run

1. npm install in the root of the project
2. cd api
3. Change name of the serverless service and update any non-unique infrastructure names.
4. npm run deploy
5. npm start will start the local environment
6. http://localhost:4000/dev/public/ open url in browser - trailing slash is important for links (in local)

Considerations

• Limitations on size of payloads from API (6mb Lambda limit is the bottleneck). The Lambda Express server will compress payloads by default to alleviate the issue.
• Expensive to not cache static content like images, alternative solution likely needed
• Cloudfront can cache specific file types to ease load on API Gateway, cache needs invalidating if they change however

Technology

• Express
• Handlebars https://handlebarsjs.com/
• Serverless Framework
• TypeScript
• Esbuild
• AWS Gateway
• AWS Lambda
• AWS Cloudfront (CDN)
• AWS DynamoDB
• Serverless Offline
• DynamoDB Local

Issues

Local Development

• Relative links on the pages seem to need to have a trailing slash on the current URL the browser is on or they will not link to a valid page address. If you have this problem try adding a slash to your current URL. e.g. http://localhost:4000/dev/public/.
• Due to API Gateway not working correctly with a root assignment for a lambda (/) the entire site is moved on path up under /public so that we can reference /public/ as root. The Cloudformation Origin then sets an origin path of /dev/public so that when you hit the Cloudfront distribution it is seamless serving /public/ as https://d23g17ecl2q2ol.cloudfront.net/.