Running eleventy build (via npm run) as AWS Lambda function

Question

I have a eleventy Node project, which renders HTML from a JSON file.

Currently, I run this locally using npm run (which runs the eleventy CLI)

Here's the workflow I have in my head:

• put the JSON file in a S3 bucket
• on each file change, run the HTML build
• push the output to a different S3 bucket, which serves the web page

Conceptually, I feel like this would be a standard FaaS use case.

Practically, I stumble over the fact that the Node.js-Lambda runtime always expects an explicit function handler to be invoked. It seems Eleventy does not provide a standard way to be invoked from code (or I have not discovered this yet).

I found that I could build my package into a Docker container and run the npm run as Entrypoint. This would surely work, but seems unnecessary, since the Lambda-provided Node.js runtimes should be capable of running my npm build command if I put my packages in the deployment artifact.

Do I have a knot in my brain? Anything I'm overlooking? Would be happy about any input.

Answer 1

I'm not sure this is supported as I don't see it documented, but I looked at the unit tests for Eleventy and saw many examples of this (https://github.com/11ty/eleventy/tree/master/test). I tried the following and it worked. Note that init an write are both async and I do NOT properly await them, I was just trying to get a simple example:

const Eleventy = require('@11ty/eleventy');

const elev = new Eleventy('./input', './output');

elev.init();
elev.write();

console.log('done');