netlify serve doesn't work with apollo v3

[PinkaminaDianePie]

Apollo v3 depends on serverless-express package, which requires requestContext field to be present on event param of AWS handler. Netlify doesn't provide such a field: CodeGenieApp/serverless-express#427

That make impossible to upgrade to Apollo v3

[erezrokah]

Hi @PinkaminaDianePie, the serve command is deprecated, see https://github.com/netlify/netlify-lambda#netlify-lambda-serve-legacy-command

I recommend switching to netlify dev. See here for more details.
If that doesn't satisfy your use case, you can open a new issue here.

[PinkaminaDianePie]

@erezrokah please don't advise to use broken solutions. netlify dev doesn't support webpack so it's not suitable for real-world cases. I used netlify for 3 different projects and netlify dev failed to handle any of them, while netlify-lambda serve worked really well for all of them. A fancy solution that doesn't work is worse than not that fancy solution that works fine. Please don't advise people to use something that doesn't work, you will just waste their time.

[erezrokah]

Hi @PinkaminaDianePie, can you open an issue on the CLI repo with your use cases so we can have a look?

You should be able to work with netlify dev and netlify-lambda (and keep your Webpack configuration), see https://github.com/netlify/netlify-lambda#when-to-use-netlify-dev-or-netlify-lambda-or-both

To clarify - the suggestion is not to stop using netlify-lambda. It's to use netlify dev for development as it supports invoking netlify-lambda to generate functions.

Also netlify dev has built-in support for esbuild (see here), so that might be suitable for your use case too.

[PinkaminaDianePie]

@erezrokah last time when i tried it (about half a year ago) I wasn't able to mix netlify dev and netlify-lambda - netlify dev just killed my PC by an infinite spawn of node processes, required a hard reset. But I will try it out again for 4th time, may be now it will work at least with netlify-lambda. BTW esbuild is not an option because it's not configurable. Webpack allows to add a lot of different stuff, like different file extensions, monorepo setup with common directories (importing outside of lambdas directory) and much more. esbuild could work for "hello world" projects, but would be probably never suitable for real-world apps.

[erezrokah]

Thanks @PinkaminaDianePie, I think you might have experienced netlify/cli#904 which had since been resolved.

As for esbuild you can track progress in https://github.com/netlify/zip-it-and-ship-it, and you might also be interested in the discussion here.

I can confirm we have customers using esbuild successfully for real world apps (enjoying the much faster build times), but we're constantly evaluating our approach and I appreciate the feedback.

[PinkaminaDianePie]

@erezrokah working esbuild is just a survivorship bias. There is a lot of people for who it won't work. You even attached an issue as proof of that - normal graphql workflow doesn't work with esbuild, and graphql is a huge part of the serverless ecosystem. What about other file extensions? What about different repo setups? You will require everyone to change their workflow to be compatible with esbuild? That's counterproductive - zero config setup should making the work simpler, not to drain dev times to find a workarounds how to make their repo compatible with esbuild. I don't need a tool which has a fast build time, but doesn't work. I'd prefer a tool which might be slower, but would work for my current case, and will give me a confidence that it would work for other use cases which I might have in the future. netlify-lambda was such kind of a tool, but was deprecated in a favour of another tool, which can't give me such a confidence. It might be faster, fancier, have a single command to run everything, but it fails on a very basic thing - it doesn't work with my current work flow, and there is no guarantees that it will support different use cases I might have in the future. So even if this time netlify dev would work for me, it would be really sad to switch to it, netlify-lambda is just better. DX is not only having a magical command what will run everything for you without a config. DX is also an ability to support different workflows and project structures. And netlify dev is much worse at it than netlify-lambda

[erezrokah]

Hi @PinkaminaDianePie, thank you for your feedback, but I think this issue is getting off topic.

If you have a specific use case that doesn't work with netlify dev or esbuild I recommend opening an issue either in the CLI repo or in https://github.com/netlify/zip-it-and-ship-it, so we can have a productive discussion about possible solutions.

[PinkaminaDianePie]

@erezrokah fyi: i've tried netlify dev for the 4th time and it doesn't work again. There is a way to build functions using netlify-lambda, but there is no way to watch and rebuild on changes. Instead of using webpack native watch mechanism, based on dependencies, netlify dev just runs it's own mechanism based on directories, so if lambda using any code outside of it, like common code between servers in monorepo it fails to detect the change. So the only way is to re-run netlify dev manually after every single change. Please, don't advise people to use it again. netlify-lambdas works, netlify dev fails every single time due to different reasons. If you are not willing to support netlify-lambdas by yourself - please ask people to submit PRs by themselves. If you don't want to review PRs - please advise people to fork it and maintain it. But please don't tell them to use netlify dev instead - that's not good. I tried it so many times for multiple projects for about a year, but it fails every single time. And even to debug it I have to go through the code, there is no way to understand if it works or not without it. Asking people to waste their time by switching from a working tool to a broken one is not nice.

[ehmicky]

@PinkaminaDianePie I have edited your comment to adhere to our Code of conduct. Negative feedback is welcome as it is very helpful, but please keep the language courteous and the discussion productive.