Can I use xvfb with AWS Lambda?

Question

I would like to offload some code to AWS Lambda that grabs a part of a screenshot of a URL and stores that in S3. It uses chromium-browser which in turn needs to run in xvfb on Ubuntu. I believe I can just download the Linux 64-bit version of chromium-browser and zip that up with my app. I'm not sure if I can do that with xvfb. Currently I use apt-get install xvfb, but I don't think you can do this in AWS Lambda?

Is there any way to use or install xvfb on AWS Lambda?

Answer 1

Yes, you can use Xvfb on aws lambda with a bit configuration. For a working example see https://github.com/nisaacson/aws-lambda-xvfb

To get this to work, you need Xvfb and xkbcomp compiled with some special configuration values. Then you will need to bundle some shared libraries with your lambda function...

---

Compile xorg-server with the following flags to get the Xvfb binary

./configure
    --with-xkb-path=/var/task/xkb \
    --with-xkb-output=/tmp \
    --with-xkb-bin-directory=/var/task/bin

Compile xkbcomp with the following flags

./configure \
    --prefix=/usr \
    --with-xkb-config-root=/var/task/xkb

Compile xkeyboard-config with the following flags

./configure \
  --prefix=/usr \
  --with-xkb-base=/var/task/xkb