Stuck on an issue?

Actual Behaviour

Plugin silently failing at installation

sls dynamodb install

Expected Behaviour

Some feedback when it fails.

Steps to reproduce it

• serverless 1.30.1
• macOS High Sierra 10.13.4
• Node v7.2.1

$ serverless create --template aws-python3 --path python-dynamo-tmp
...
$ npm install --save serverless-dynamodb-local
...
sls dynamodb install

Installing dynamodb does nothing.

This is my serverless.yml

service: python-dynamo-tmp

provider:
  name: aws
  runtime: python3.6

plugins:
  - serverless-dynamodb-local

LogCat for the issue

After several hours of a headache since I just started looking into serverless and I’m not a Node.js developer it occurred to me to search the code base for something and I landed on the utils.js inside $project_path/node_modules/dynamodb-localhost/dynamodb/ and I added console.log(.. to print out the absolute path of the installation folder since nothing was being created and nothing was being printed to the terminal, this was the output…

/Users/fcastellanos/Projects/serverless/python-dynamo-tmp/node_modules/dynamodb-localhost/dynamodb//Users/fcastellanos/Projects/serverless/python-dynamo-tmp/.dynamodb

Which was weird so what I did was to rewrite the absPath to just return the relPath parameter…

var absPath = function (relPath) {
    return relPath;
};

After that change I ran again the installation again but now successfully creating the .dynamodb directory in my project’s path, but now whenever I try to start the dynamodb service I get this…

$ sls dynamodb start
Dynamodb Local Started, Visit: http://localhost:8000/shell
Error: Unable to access jarfile DynamoDBLocal.jar
DynamoDB Local failed to start with code 1

I added a bunch more loggers all over the place and ended up in $project_path/node_modules/dynamodb-localhost/dynamodb/config.json where the install_path is just /bin so I changed it to…

{
    "setup": {
        "download_url": "http://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/dynamodb-local/dynamodb_local_latest.tar.gz",
        "install_path": "/Users/fcastellanos/Projects/serverless/python-dynamo-tmp/.dynamodb",
        "jar": "DynamoDBLocal.jar"
    },
    "start": {
        "port": 8000
    }
}

After making those changes everything works, I mean, I run sls dynamodb start without any errors and I can even go to http://localhost:8000/shell and see the DynamoDB Web Shell

Would you like to work on the issue?

I’m no node.js developer or serverless expert but I can help however I can.

Thanks!