What’s new in sls-dev-tools — 13/05
By: Mansur Pasha
Tags: Tools, Open Source, Serverless, AWS, Lambda

It has been a busy few weeks for sls-dev-tools. The tool is now in version 1.1.6, gaining a host of new features since last time, such as Lambda invocation, startup wizards, and displaying more information on all your Lambdas. Additionally, we launched on ProductHunt this week, and the toolkit has gained a new addition, sls-dev-tools Guardian!

For those who haven’t heard of it, sls-dev-tools aims at becoming the equivalent of Chrome Dev Tools for the Serverless World. Our goal is to provide the Serverless community with metrics, logs and feedback directly in the terminal, eliminating the need to constantly jump to the AWS Console.

If you find this tool useful or have any feedback please get in touch via GitHub issues, Twitter, or our Gitter page! If you like what you’re seeing a ⭐️ would go a long way!

Contributing to the tool

We’re always excited to get feedback on the tool, find out where we can improve, and hear what else you want to see. sls-dev-tools is an open-source project, and a large number of our features come directly from community suggestions and issues. Plus, if there’s something you want to see in sls-dev-tools and you know how you want to do it, we’d love for you to submit a PR and feature you in our next article, as well as add you to our list of contributors!

Become part of the sls-dev-tools team

If you don’t know where to start, we recently released two good first issues, with detailed steps on how to approach implementing the features. Additionally, the team is always available on the sls-dev-tools Gitter to provide support and answer any questions.

Search for the “good first issue” label

Big thank you to James Mullen (@jamesnmullen) for a series of contributions to the tool, from allowing you to invoke functions from within the tool and providing information on your lambda layers, to allowing you to submit MFA tokens via a modal on startup. Another big thank you to Arto Liukkonen (@artoliukkonen) for also contributing again, and adding an update notifier to the tool to let you know when a new version has been released.

Feature spotlight

sls-dev-tools Guardian

The sls-dev-toolkit just got bigger. Say hello to sls-dev-tools Guardian, a highly opinionated, highly configurable, automated best-practice audit tool for Serverless architectures. Like all our features, it’s framework agnostic and can be run in one simple command. Just add the -c option when running the tool. To find out more, read more about Guardian here, or check out the Guardian docs page.

Receive immediate feedback on your stack

Invoking functions

A long requested feature, you can now invoke your Lambdas in a couple of keypresses. Just press i on a function to open the invoke modal. Combined with the ability to deploy your Lambda functions from inside the tool, testing code changes just got a lot faster. Thanks to James Mullen (@jamesnmullen) for implementing this feature!

Deploy your code and then immediately invoke it, while never leaving the tool

Lambda Statistics Modal

Press l on a Lambda function to get a breakdown of its recent performance, including the number of recent invocations, recent durations, and error percentage. Plus, you can view its deployment history and layers as well. Feel free to let us know what else you’d like to see here!

All the information you need, in one place

Modal Wizards

We really want sls-dev-tools to be as simple to use as possible, so now when you start up the tool, if you haven’t supplied a region or stack name, you’ll be able to select them from startup wizards.

Running the tool just got simpler

Update notifier

The tool will now let you know when a new version is released. Thanks to Arto Liukkonen (@artoliukkonen) for this handy feature.

What’s next?

We’re currently wrapping up our latest big feature, sls-dev-tools Relay, which aims to put the instant back into instant feedback. After Relay goes live, we’ll be looking at expanding the rule set for Guardian.

Github: https://github.com/Theodo-UK/sls-dev-tools

Docs: https://theodo-uk.github.io/sls-dev-tools/