creating-a-service.md

Creating a service

Let's create our first Serverless service!

Creating our service

You can create a service based on a specific template that specifies which provider and runtime to use (take a look here to learn more about templates).

To create a service with a nodejs runtime running on aws just pass the aws-nodejs template to the create command:

serverless create --template aws-nodejs

This will create a service and generate serverless.yml, serverless.env.yml and handler.js files in the current working directory.

Open the service inside your editor

Let's take a closer look at the skeleton Serverless has created for us. Open up the first-service directory with your favorite editor.

You'll see the following files:

• serverless.yml
• serverless.env.yml
• handler.js

serverless.yml

This is our core service file. You can see the name of our service, the provider and the first function inside the functions definition which points to the handler.js file.

If you want to learn more about the serverless.yml file you might want check out our in depth guide about it.

serverless.env.yml

This file includes all the environment variables Serverless uses. It automatically creates environment variables for a default stage called dev and a default region called us-east-1. Those variables will be referenced and used as a default later on for deployment.

If you want to learn more about the serverless.env.yml file you might want check out our in depth guide about it.

handler.js

The handler.js file includes a function skeleton which returns a simple message. The function definition in serverless.yml will point to this handler.js file and the function inside of it.

Conclusion

We've just created our very first service with one simple create command. With that in place we're ready to deploy our service (which now includes one example function) to our provider (in this case Amazon Web Services).

Next step > Deploying our service