HTTP Requests in an AWS Lambda

Question

I'm new to Lambdas so perhaps there is something I've not caught on to just yet, but I've written a simple Lambda function to do an HTTP request to an external site. For some reason, whether I use Node's http or https modules, I get an ECONNREFUSED.

Here's my Lambda:

var http = require('http');  exports.handler = function (event, context) {     http.get('www.google.com', function (result) {         console.log('Success, with: ' + result.statusCode);         context.done(null);     }).on('error', function (err) {         console.log('Error, with: ' + err.message);         context.done("Failed");     }); }; 

Here's the log output:

START RequestId: request hash 2015-08-04T14:57:56.744Z    request hash                Error, with: connect ECONNREFUSED 2015-08-04T14:57:56.744Z    request hash                {"errorMessage":"Failed"} END RequestId: request hash 

Is there a role permission I need to have to do HTTP requests? Does Lambda even permit plain old HTTP requests? Are there special headers I need to set?

Any guidance is appreciated.

Answer 1

I solved my own problem.

Apparently, if you decide to feed the URL in as the first parameter to .get(), you must include the http:// up front of the URL, e.g., http://www.google.com.

var http = require('http');  exports.handler = function (event, context) {   http.get('http://www.google.com', function (result) {     console.log('Success, with: ' + result.statusCode);     context.done(null);   }).on('error', function (err) {     console.log('Error, with: ' + err.message);     context.done("Failed");   }); }; 

Alternatively, you can specify the first parameter as a hash of options, where hostname can be the simple form of the URL. Example:

var http = require('http');  exports.handler = function (event, context) {   var getConfig = {     hostname: 'www.google.com'   };   http.get(getConfig, function (result) {     console.log('Success, with: ' + result.statusCode);     context.done(null);   }).on('error', function (err) {     console.log('Error, with: ' + err.message);     context.done("Failed");   }); };