sqlite3 error on AWS lambda with Python 3

Question

I am building a python 3.6 AWS Lambda deploy package and was facing an issue with SQLite.

In my code I am using nltk which has a

Answer 1

Depending on what you're doing with NLTK, I may have found a solution.

The base nltk module imports a lot of dependencies, many of which are not used by substantial portions of its feature set. In my use case, I'm only using the nltk.sent_tokenize, which carries no functional dependency on sqlite3 even though sqlite3 gets imported as a dependency.

I was able to get my code working on AWS Lambda by changing

import nltk

to

import imp
import sys
sys.modules["sqlite"] = imp.new_module("sqlite")
sys.modules["sqlite3.dbapi2"] = imp.new_module("sqlite.dbapi2")
import nltk

This dynamically creates empty modules for sqlite and sqlite.dbapi2. When nltk.corpus.reader.panlex_lite tries to import sqlite, it will get our empty module instead of the standard library version. That means the import will succeed, but it also means that when nltk tries to use the sqlite module it will fail.

If you're using any functionality that actually depends on sqlite, I'm afraid I can't help. But if you're trying to use other nltk functionality and just need to get around the lack of sqlite, this technique might work.