This template demonstrates how to make a simple HTTP API with Python running on AWS Lambda and API Gateway using the Serverless Framework.

This template does not include any kind of persistence (database). For more advanced examples, check out the serverless/examples repository which includes DynamoDB, Mongo, Fauna and other examples.

serverless deploy

After deploying, you should see output similar to:

Deploying "aws-python-http-api" to stage "dev" (us-east-1)

✔ Service deployed to stack aws-python-http-api-dev (85s)

endpoint: GET - https://6ewcye3q4d.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
functions:
  hello: aws-python-http-api-dev-hello (2.3 kB)

Note: In current form, after deployment, your API is public and can be invoked by anyone. For production deployments, you might want to configure an authorizer. For details on how to do that, refer to http event docs.

After successful deployment, you can call the created application via HTTP:

curl https://xxxxxxx.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/

Which should result in response similar to the following (removed input content for brevity):

{
  "message": "Go Serverless v4.0! Your function executed successfully!"
}

You can invoke your function locally by using the following command:

serverless invoke local --function hello

Which should result in response similar to the following:

{
  "statusCode": 200,
  "body": "{\n  \"message\": \"Go Serverless v4.0! Your function executed successfully!\"}"
}

Alternatively, it is also possible to emulate API Gateway and Lambda locally by using serverless-offline plugin. In order to do that, execute the following command:

serverless plugin install -n serverless-offline

It will add the serverless-offline plugin to devDependencies in package.json file as well as will add it to plugins in serverless.yml.

After installation, you can start local emulation with:

serverless offline

To learn more about the capabilities of serverless-offline, please refer to its GitHub repository.

In case you would like to include 3rd party dependencies, no plugin install is needed — the Serverless Framework bundles Python dependencies natively. Simply add your dependencies to a requirements.txt file (Pipfile and pyproject.toml are also supported but require additional configuration) and, if you don't already have one, add a custom.pythonRequirements block to your serverless.yml to activate and configure the built-in packaging, for example:

custom:
  pythonRequirements: {}

They will then be automatically injected into the Lambda package during the build process.