NPM package `pem` doesn't seem to work in AWS lambda NodeJS 10.x (results in OpenSSL error)

Question

When I run the function locally on NodeJS 11.7.0 it works, when I run it in AWS Lambda NodeJS 8.10 it works, but I\'ve recently tried to run it in

Answer 1

What you can do is to create a lambda layer with the openssl library. Using the lambdaci/lambda:build-nodejes10.x you can compile the openssl library and create a zip file from the install. The zip file you can then use as a layer for your lambda.

Create a file called create-openssl-zip.sh and make sure to chmod u+x it.

#!/bin/bash -x

# This file should be run inside the lambci/lambda:build-nodejs10.x container
yum update -y
yum install autoconf bison gcc gcc-c++ libcurl-devel libxml2-devel -y
curl -sL http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-1.1.1d.tar.gz | tar -xvz
cd openssl-1.1.1d
./config --prefix=/var/task/nodejs/openssl --openssldir=/var/task/nodejs/openssl && make && make install
cd /var/task/
rm -rf nodejs/openssl/share
rm -rf nodejs/openssl/include
zip -r lambda-openssl-layer.zip nodejs
cp lambda-openssl-layer.zip /opt/layer/

Then run:

docker run -it -v `pwd`:/opt/layer lambci/lambda:build-nodejs10.x /opt/layer/create-openssl-zip.sh

This will run the script inside the docker container and when it is done you have a file called lambda-openssl-layer.zip in your current directory.

Upload this lambda to an s3 bucket and create a lambda layer. On your original lambda, add this layer and modify your code so that the PEM library knows where to look for the OpenSSL library as follows:

PEM.config({
  pathOpenSSL: '/opt/nodejs/openssl/bin/openssl'
})

And finally add an extra environment variable to your lambda called LD_LIBRARY_PATH with value /opt/nodejs/openssl/lib

Otherwise it will fail with: /opt/nodejs/openssl/bin/openssl: error while loading shared libraries: libssl.so.1.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory