Serverless NodeJS / Native node_modules

Question

I'm having an issue getting a node module to load in AWS Lambda using the Serverless Framework. One of my node packages uses native libraries so I used an EC2 to create the node_module folders and then copied them to my Serverless project. Everything works if I manually zip the project and upload to AWS Lambda but if I use serverless deploy without an artifact specified, I get an error about the module (specifically: ELF file's phentsize not the expected size regarding a .node file)

I've tried adding excludeDevDependencies: false which makes the deployment larger but still gives me the error. Currently, it only works if I zip the contents of the project folder and specify that file as the artifact to upload. Is there a different way to get a node module with native bindings to deploy with Serverless?

UPDATE: After turning off the exclusion of dev dependencies, packaging using serverless package and examining the expanded zip file serverless creates, I discovered the file sizes of the .o and .a files are different in the packaged version as compared to the original. Is this normal?

Answer 1

I ran into this problem and did some digging. It turns out that v1.21.0 of serverless broke packaging of binaries.

https://forum.serverless.com/t/serverless-1-21-0-breaks-sharp-library/2606

https://github.com/serverless/serverless/issues/4182

The recommended fix is to upgrade to v1.21.1.