Local development for functions

It is possible to run event-driven functions locally.

💡

To run HTTP applications (like Laravel or Symfony) locally, read Local development for HTTP applications instead.

With Serverless Framework

The serverless bref:local command invokes your PHP functions locally, using PHP installed on your machine. You can provide an event if your function expects one.

The serverless bref:local command is a simpler alternative to the native serverless invoke local command, which tries to run PHP using Docker with very little success. Use serverless bref:local instead of serverless invoke local.

For example, given this function:

my-function.php

return function (array $event) {
    return 'Hello ' . ($event['name'] ?? 'world');
};

serverless.yml

# ...
 
functions:
    hello:
        handler: my-function.php
        runtime: php-81

You can invoke it with or without event data:

$ serverless bref:local -f hello
Hello world
 
# With JSON event data
$ serverless bref:local -f hello --data '{"name": "Jane"}'
Hello Jane
 
# With JSON in a file
$ serverless bref:local -f hello --path=event.json
Hello Jane

⚠️

On Windows PowerShell, you must escape the "double quote" char if you write JSON directly in the CLI. Example:

$ serverless bref:local -f hello --data '{\"name\": \"Bill\"}'

The serverless bref:local command runs using the local PHP installation. If you prefer to use Docker, check out the "Without Serverless Framework" section below.

Without Serverless Framework

If you do not use serverless.yml but something else, like SAM/AWS CDK/Terraform, use the vendor/bin/bref-local command instead:

$ vendor/bin/bref-local <handler> <event-data>
 
# For example
$ vendor/bin/bref-local my-function.php
Hello world
 
# With JSON event data
$ vendor/bin/bref-local my-function.php '{"name": "Jane"}'
Hello Jane
 
# With a path to a file containing a JSON event.
$cat event.json
{
    "name": "Alex"
}
$ vendor/bin/bref-local --path event.json my-function.php
Hello Alex

With Docker

If you want to run your function in Docker:

$ docker run --rm -it --entrypoint= -v $(PWD):/var/task:ro bref/php-81:2 vendor/bin/bref-local my-function.php
 
# You can also use the `dev` images for a simpler command (and Xdebug and Blackfire in the image):
$ docker run --rm -it -v $(PWD):/var/task:ro bref/php-81-fpm-dev:2 vendor/bin/bref-local my-function.php

You can also use Docker Compose, like described in Local development for HTTP applications:

docker-compose.yml

version: "3.5"
services:
    app:
        image: bref/php-81-fpm-dev:2
        volumes:
            - .:/var/task

Then run functions:

$ docker-compose run app vendor/bin/bref-local my-function.php

API Gateway local development

If you build HTTP applications with API Gateway HTTP events, serverless bref:local is a bit unpractical because you need to manually craft HTTP events in JSON.

Instead, you can use the bref/dev-server (opens in a new tab) package to emulate API Gateway locally.

Local development Monitoring