re:Web

re:Web Project Infos

re:Web is a small add-in binary that enables classic web applications to run on AWS Lambda.

For a detailed description, please see the README on Github.

Relevant Links

Github project page
re:Web blog (this site)
re:Web in the Amazon ECR Public Gallery
re:Web in the Serverless Application Repository EXPERIMENTAL

Contact

For bug reports, pull requests and other issues please use Github.

For everything else:

I'm trying to get used to Twitter as @apparentorder. DMs are open.
Sometimes I peek into the og-aws Slack, as "appo"
I'm old enough to prefer IRC -- find me in #reweb on Freenode.
Last resort: Try legacy message delivery to apparentorder@neveragain.de.

Wordpress plugins

A basic Wordpress installation runs fine on re:Web, but one major obstacle for many real-world uses is large assets:

API Gateway / Application Load Balancer put some hefty size limits on uploads and downloads -- for example, using very large images will lead to errors.

There are two plugins which help a lot to make Wordpress work nicely with large assets:

S3 Uploads offloads all such assets to S3, so Wordpress/re:Web don't have to deal with delivery of those assets at all (therefore bypassing the size restrictions)
Tuxedo Big File Uploads replaces the Wordpress file upload function to use chunked transfers instead

With both plugins installed, uploading and delivering large assets works nicely.

Note that it's most likely necessary to install them manually (unzip to the Wordpress plugin folder in EFS), because their installation takes longer than API Gateway's maximum timeout.

re:Web for PHP + nginx in the Serverless Application Repository

There is now a re:Web package in the AWS Serverless Application Repository that comes ready-to-go with nginx and php-fpm included.

Usage goes something like this:

Make sure you have an EFS Access Point that will be your "web root", with at least a simple index.html for testing
Deploy the package from the Serverless Application Repository
For deployment, you will need to provide
- the EFS Access Point ARN
- the VPC Subnet ID(s) for the Lambda function
- the Security Group ID(s) for the Lambda function
Wait for the deployment to complete -- you can monitor progress in the "Deployments" tab (should take 2-5 minutes)
After deployment, go to the API Gateway Console and find the Invoke URL

There will be a Lambda function and a corresponding API Gateway that's ready to serve web requests and even full PHP applications from your EFS. Just open the Invoke URL in your browser.

A potential next step might be to manually add a Custom Domain Name to API Gateway, or configure an Application Load Balancer to connect to that Lambda. And to put some content there, for example some PHP application.

To delete the deployment, simply delete the stack in CloudFormation.

Note that I consider this re:Web package even more experimental than re:Web itself :-) If you give this a try, let me know!

Dogfood!

To have something akin to a production site (lol), I've decided to give re:Web a homepage / blog.

It will be a good place to post news and updates.

And it runs on re:Web, hence the title.

This site runs on Nicholas, "a lightweight, flat-file, easy to use & nearly-headless blogging system". This was a coincidental discovery, but it's pretty nice so far! I love simple things.

Nicholas is PHP without external dependencies (no database!), so it's an awesome fit for nginx+php powered by re:Web!

Thanks to Lambda + re:Web, this blog is blazingly fast, it would scale to BBC-levels of traffic unmodified¹, and is highly available in three different Availability Zones.

And it costs roughly... nothing!

Well, besides AWS default quotas. Still, default quotas will handle more traffic than you'll ever need. ↩