Hit counter handler

Hit counter Lambda handler #

Okay, now let’s write the Lambda handler code for our hit counter.

Create the file lambda/hitcounter.js:

const { DynamoDB, Lambda } = require('aws-sdk');

exports.handler = async function(event) {
  console.log("request:", JSON.stringify(event, undefined, 2));

  // create AWS SDK clients
  const dynamo = new DynamoDB();
  const lambda = new Lambda();

  // update dynamo entry for "path" with hits++
  await dynamo.updateItem({
    TableName: process.env.HITS_TABLE_NAME,
    Key: { path: { S: event.path } },
    UpdateExpression: 'ADD hits :incr',
    ExpressionAttributeValues: { ':incr': { N: '1' } }
  }).promise();

  // call downstream function and capture response
  const resp = await lambda.invoke({
    FunctionName: process.env.DOWNSTREAM_FUNCTION_NAME,
    Payload: JSON.stringify(event)
  }).promise();

  console.log('downstream response:', JSON.stringify(resp, undefined, 2));

  // return response back to upstream caller
  return JSON.parse(resp.Payload);
};

Discovering resources at runtime #

You’ll notice that this code relies on two environment variables:

HITS_TABLE_NAME is the name of the DynamoDB table to use for storage.
DOWNSTREAM_FUNCTION_NAME is the name of the downstream AWS Lambda function.

Since the actual name of the table and the downstream function will only be decided when we deploy our app, we need to wire up these values from our construct code. We’ll do that in the next section.