A few months ago I released Lovage. It’s a Python only serverless library that’s focused more on RPC and less on HTTP and events. One of my favorite features was the simple dependency management. All external dependencies are handled in a serverless fashion. Other frameworks/libraries locally download all the dependencies (which often requires cross downloading/compiling with Docker), package them up, and then upload them with every code change. Lovage does this all in a Lambda function and stores the dependencies in a Lambda layer. It saves a lot of time, especially for minor code changes that don’t update dependencies.

Recently I needed to create some smaller serverless projects that do use events and HTTP. I turned back to Serverless Framework. But instead of using the good old serverles-python-requirements, I decided to create serverless-pydeps. It’s another Serverless Framework plug-in that handles Python dependencies the same way as Lovage. By not handling dependency collection locally, it gains the same speed advantages as Lovage.

If you want to use it yourself, run the following command. No further configuration is needed.

sls plugin install -n serverless-pydeps

Even with a large requirements.txt file, the upload is still tiny and deployment is quick.