Wire-O

Wire-O is a serverless JavaScript (ES2015) app that lets you quickly set up an API on AWS to merge PDFs and send back links of merged PDFs.

Uses Serverless framework, AWS Lambda (Node 6.10), AWS API Gateway, AWS S3, and PDFMerge.

Setup and Deployment

First things first: Get the tools you need

You can use the AWS Console, but the AWS CLI allows for the scripting of Lambda uploads. Here's how to get it:

1. Install pip first if you don't have it already with sudo easy_install pip (on Mac OSX)
2. Install the CLI with sudo -H pip install awscli --upgrade --ignore-installed six (on Mac OSX)

After the AWS CLI is installed...

1. Find your Access Key & Secret Access Keys, and make sure you have the permissions you need to access AWS.
2. Run aws configure.
3. Put in the Access & Secret Access keys.
4. Install the Serverless framework.

Create wire-o.yml and set bucket name variable

1. Create a wire-o.yml file at root.
2. Define s3BucketName variable in the wire-o.yml file. This is set in the serverless.yml file and used in the JavaScript code.

s3BucketName: "s3-bucket-name-goes-here"

Deployment

This command will compile JavaScript with Babel, and deploy the app using Serverless:

npm run deploy

The Endpoint

After you have deployed Wire-O, you will have created an API Gateway endpoint that accepts POST requests and triggers a Lambda Function to run. You will see the URL in your console output, which will look something like this:

https://o64722rmyh.execute-api.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/dev/merge

With this endpoint, the JSON request body accepts an array of pdfUrls:

{
  "pdfUrls": [
    "https://s3.amazonaws.com/superglue/PCAH_PDF_TEMPLATE.pdf",
    "https://s3.amazonaws.com/superglue/hello.pdf"
  ]
}

The JSON response body provides a link to the merged PDF hosted on S3:

{
  "mergedPdf": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/superglue/merged/1ed989e5-026d-41f6-917f-953b4fd35bd8.pdf"
}

Monitoring

You can view how the Lambda function is performing by going into the AWS Console and viewing logs in Cloudwatch.