Import Custom Python Packages on AWS Lambda Function

3 min readSep 7, 2018

This tutorial is for “how to import the custom (BeatifulSoup4)python packages on AWS lambda”

Step 1:

Create the virtualenv in your local machine.
Note:
The AWS lambda only support the python2.7 and python3.6. So we can create either python2.7 or python3.6 environment. Now i have python3.6, so i am using python3.6 environment. If you dont have python3.6 i will explain how to implement that too.

Install virtualenvironment in your local machine(pip or pip3).

sudo pip install virtualenv

Python2.7(If you have):

Create the virtual environment

#Go Home
manivannan@manivannan:~$ cd $HOME
manivannan@manivannan:~$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python2.7 BSoup
# The BSoup is name of virtualenvironment
# Activate your virtual environment using below command
manivannan@manivannan:~$ source BSoup/bin/activate
(BSoup) manivannan@manivannan:~$
# This environment only working with python2.7

Python3.6(If you have):

Create the virtual environment

#Go Home
manivannan@manivannan:~$ cd $HOME
manivannan@manivannan:~$ virtualenv -p /usr/bin/python3.6 BSoup
# The last BSoup is name of virtualenvironment
# Activate your virtual environment using below command
manivannan@manivannan:~$ source BSoup/bin/activate
(BSoup) manivannan@manivannan:~$
# This environment only working with python3.6

Successfully created the virtual environment.

Step 2:

Install Packages to Environment

pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install lxml

Step3:

Create the lambda_function.py and paste the below lines.

import json
import bs4 as bs
from urllib import requestdef lambda_handler(event, context):
    # TODO implement
    html_data = request.urlopen("https://pythonprogramming.net/introduction-scraping-parsing-beautiful-soup-tutorial/").read()
    soup = bs.BeautifulSoup(html_data,'lxml')
    title = soup.find('h2')
    return {
        "statusCode": 200,
        "body": json.dumps(title.text)
    }

Step4:

Move the lambda_function.py to your environment(BSoup) site-packages folder

(BSoup) manivannan@manivannan:~$ mv lambda_function.py BSoup/lib/python3.6/site-packages/
(BSoup) manivannan@manivannan:~$ cd BSoup/lib/python3.6/site-packages/
(BSoup) manivannan@manivannan:~/BSoup/lib/python3.6/site-packages$ ls