README.md

Serverless Comment System

Deploy an entirely functional comment system to your entirely static website.

Features

• AWS Lambda
• Google reCAPTCHA verification
• DynamoDB
• SES mailing to the site owner for comment updates

Installation

• Install the serverless framework
• Create an AWS account
• Add IAM permissions for serverless. Serverless has a video tutorial, but ive included the instructions below
  • In the AWS search bar, search for “IAM”.
  • On the IAM page, click on “Users” on the sidebar, then the “Add user” button.
  • On the Add user page, give the user a name – something like “serverless” is appropriate. Check “Programmatic access” under Access type then click next.
  • On the permissions screen, click on the “Attach existing policies directly” tab, search for “AdministratorAccess” in the list, check it, and click next.
  • On the review screen you should see your user name, with “Programmatic access”, and “AdministratorAccess”, then create the user.
  • The confirmation screen shows the user “Access key ID” and “Secret access key”, you’ll need these to provide the Serverless Framework with access. In your CLI, type yarn sls config credentials --provider aws --key YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID --secret YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY, replacing YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID and YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY with the keys on the confirmation screen.

Your credentials are configured now, but while we’re in the AWS console let’s

• Set up Simple Email Service

  • Click Console Home in the top left corner to go home.
  • On the home page, in the AWS search bar, search for “Simple Email Service”.
  • On the SES Home page, click on “Email Addresses” in the sidebar.
  • On the Email Addresses listing page, click the “Verify a New Email Address” button.
  • In the dialog window, type your email address then click “Verify This Email Address”.
  • You’ll receive an email in moments containing a link to verify the address. Click on the link to complete the process.

• Create a DynamoDB table. I recommend using a partition key called “page” of type “string”, and a primary sort key called “ts” (“timestamp” is a reserved word in dynamodb) of type “number”. call the table “<your name>-comments”:

• create your config file with cp config.json.example config.json

• Edit config.json to make it your own values

• Run serverless Deploy

Troubleshooting

• Be sure you are using the same Jquery link provided in the form.html, using a different version can change the names of data when they are sent during requests. Ex. one version of jquery sends a post that includes "method": "POST" while another Jquery version refers to it in the request as "httpMethod": "POST"
• Be sure you include the integration: LAMBDA in serverless.yaml, otherwise you will run into CORS issues.