AWS Lambda: Programatically Create a Python ‘Hello World’ Function

I’ve been playing around with AWS Lambda over the last couple of weeks and I wanted to automate the creation of these functions and all their surrounding config.

Let’s say we have the following Hello World function:

def lambda_handler(event, context):
    print("Hello world")

To upload it to AWS, we need to put it inside a ZIP file, so let’s do that:

$ zip HelloWorld.zip HelloWorld.py

$ unzip -l HelloWorld.zip 
Archive:  HelloWorld.zip
  Length     Date   Time    Name
 --------    ----   ----    ----
       61  04-02-17 22:04   HelloWorld.py
 --------                   -------
       61                   1 file

Now we’re ready to write a script to create our AWS Lambda function.

import boto3

lambda_client = boto3.client('lambda')

fn_name = "HelloWorld"
fn_role = 'arn:aws:iam::[your-aws-id]:role/lambda_basic_execution'

lambda_client.create_function(
    FunctionName=fn_name,
    Runtime='python2.7',
    Role=fn_role,
    Handler="{0}.lambda_handler".format(fn_name),
    Code={'ZipFile': open("{0}.zip".format(fn_name), 'rb').read(), },
)

[your-aws-id] needs to be replaced with the identifier of our AWS account. We can find that out be running the following command against the AWS CLI:

$ aws ec2 describe-security-groups --query 'SecurityGroups[0].OwnerId' --output text
123456789012

Now we can create our function:

$ python CreateHelloWorld.py

And if we test the function, we’ll get the expected output: