lambda not finding my node_modules

Question

I'm trying to upload node_modules with my lambda but I'm getting "Cannot find module" error.

I've set up a real simple hello world js file with

var async = require('async');

And I have manually copied over a node_modules/async folder into the distribution - and I copy up the node_modules folder along with the hello world js file.

I do a very similar thing with my photo resizer lambda which takes node modules as well and that works. What's different that I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

The structure of the zip file is important. Let's say I have a javascript function contained in a file called foo.js that has dependencies on other node modules.

In my development environment, I would have a structure like this:

devdir/
    foo/
        foo.js
        node_modules/
            <the nodejs modules>

I then create a zip file called foo.zip structured like this:

$ unzip -vl foo.zip 
Archive:  foo.zip
 Length   Method    Size  Ratio   Date   Time   CRC-32    Name
 -------  ------  ------- -----   ----   ----   ------    ----
       0  Defl:N        0   0%  08-05-15 14:44  00000000  ./
    3047  Defl:N      981  68%  08-05-15 14:25  06e3e178 foo.js
       0  Defl:N        0   0%  08-03-15 13:37  00000000  node_modules/
       0  Defl:N        0   0%  08-03-15 13:37  00000000 node_modules/.bin/
     597  Defl:N      301  50%  03-05-15 14:29  9b0c2ba2  node_modules/.bin/uuid
       0  Defl:N        0   0%  07-16-15 08:32  00000000  node_modules/async/
    3454  Defl:N     1537  56%  06-28-15 18:37  967a5404  node_modules/async/CHANGELOG.md
<...>

Make sure your zip file is structured like this and you should be ok.