Architect 4.3: even faster local offline development, and sunrise support for Python!

Ryan Block’s avatar

by Ryan Block
@ryan
on

Terminal with scrolling code

Architect treats local offline development of serverless apps as a first-class concern, and today we’re taking it to the next level.

Architect 4.3 (Yeti) includes an all-new version of sandbox (npx sandbox) that starts up instantly, instantly loads your local code changes, and best of all, paves the way for multiple runtimes.

Instant startup

The new Architect sandbox now boots up instantly. In testing, >50 route projects start in under 300ms on a modern laptop. Whether your serverless app has 2 or 200 functions, you’ll never experience lag on account of simply continuing to build out your app.

Live reloading

In addition to locally mocking cloud functions, Architect sandbox now even more closely emulates the properties of a true serverless stack by loading your latest code with each new request. Yet another small but meaningful performance improvement to make you faster and keep you in flow.

Sunrise support for Python

We’re also very excited to share that Architect now has sunrise support for Python. In 4.3, you can now provision Python Lambdas, preview and test them headlessly in sandbox, and deploy them to staging and production.

Future versions will include support for locally generating Hello World boilerplate, and a port of the arc-functions helper library.

As you know, Architect is an open source project, and we could use your bugs and PRs, Python hackers!

Try out Architect in 30 seconds

Ready to give serverless a swing? No AWS account required, as you’ve probably figured out by now, Architect runs locally and offline!

  1. Create a basic Node project:
    mkdir testapp
    cd testapp
    npm init --yes
  2. Install Architect:
    npm i @architect/architect
  3. Create a basic .arc file:
    @app
    testapp
    @http
    get /
    
  4. Generate your project locally:
    npx create --local
  5. [optional] To configure make your get / route a Python function, create src/http/get-index/.arc-config and add the following to it:
    @aws
    runtime python3.6
    
  6. [optional] Now create a new Python function at src/http/get-index/index.py that includes a method named handler:
    def handler(event, context):
      return {
        'status': 200,
        'type': 'text/html; charset=utf8',
        'body': '<h1>Hello world!</h1>'
      }
  7. Fire up the Architect sandbox to preview your work:
    npx sandbox

Yeti with a coffee