Run headless Chrome on AWS Lambda

This is an example of running headless Chrome on AWS Lambda. The instructions below use ClaudiaJS to package the function, but it isn't a dependency—just a build/deploy tool. The included Google Chrome binary, compiled for Lambda, comes from the Serverless Chrome project.

Hello world

Claudia must be installed globally.

npm i -g claudia

Create the Lambda function.

claudia create --region us-east-1 --handler index.handler --memory 1280 --timeout 120

Note the adjustments to allocated memory and timeout.

Now you can trigger the function.

claudia test-lambda

Notes

Chrome is a large binary; it fits under Lambda's current 50MB limit with just a few MB to spare. That should be enough, however, for some interesting projects.

Because the payload is so large, you may hit a timeout when uploading to AWS with Claudia. Use the --aws-client-timeout flag to increase the timeout from the default (120000ms / 120s / 2min).

Note that while screenshots are easy to take with headless Chrome, the browser is running on Linux with non-mainstream font support. Web fonts are fully supported, though. See the DevTools API documentation for more information.