lambdafs

LambdaFS

Efficient (de)compression package for AWS Lambda, supporting Brolti, Gzip and Tarballs

Install

npm install lambdafs --save-prod

CLI

This package provides a brotli CLI command to conveniently compress files and/or folders.

npx lambdafs /path/to/compress

The resulting file will be a (potentially tarballed) Brotli compressed file, with the same base name as the source.

Due to the highest compression level, it might take a while to compress large files (100MB ~ 5 minutes).

Usage

The nodejs12.x or nodejs14.x AWS Lambda runtime is required for this package to work properly.

const lambdafs = require('lambdafs');

exports.handler = async (event, context) => {
  try {
    let file = __filename; // /var/task/index.js
    let folder = __dirname; // /var/task

    // Compressing
    let compressed = {
      file: await lambdafs.deflate(file), // /tmp/index.js.gz
      folder: await lambdafs.deflate(folder), // /tmp/task.tar.gz
    };

    // Decompressing
    let decompressed = {
      file: await lambdafs.inflate(compressed.file), // /tmp/index.js
      folder: await lambdafs.inflate(compressed.folder), // /tmp/task
    };

    return context.succeed({ file, folder, compressed, decompressed });
  } catch (error) {
    return context.fail(error);
  }
};

API

deflate(path: string): Promise<string>

Compresses a file/folder with Gzip and returns the path to the compressed (tarballed) file.

The resulting file will be saved under the default temporary directory (/tmp on AWS Lambda).

Due to costly execution time on AWS Lambda, Gzip is always used to compress files.

inflate(path: string): Promise<string>

Decompresses a (tarballed) Brotli or Gzip compressed file and returns the path to the decompressed file/folder.

The resulting file(s) will be saved under the default temporary directory (/tmp on AWS Lambda).

Supported extensions are: .br, .gz, .tar, .tar.br (and .tbr), .tar.gz (and .tgz).

For tarballs, original file modes are perserved. For any other files 0700 is assumed.

Rationale

Getting large resources onto AWS Lambda can be a challenging task due to the deployment package size limit:

Limit	Context
50 MB	Zipped, for direct uploads.
250 MB	Unzipped, S3 and layers.

For this reason, it's important to achieve a very high compression ratio as well as fast decompression times.

This is where the Brotli algorithm comes in:

It allows us to get the best compression ratio and fast decompression times (at the expense of a slow compression).

License

MIT