# The Blog Our latest insights, opinions and general musings as we float about on the vast ocean of tech we call home. August 14, 2018 • 3 min read ##### James Allardice # Introducing our open-source Serverless starter kit We are excited to announce that we have released our [Serverless](https://serverless.com/framework/) framework starter kit as an open-source project on GitHub. Following the [release of our Gatsby starter kits](/content/blog/introducing-our-gatsby-starter-kits/index.html) this is the next step in our efforts to give back to the community. > [Check out the code on GitHub](https://github.com/orangejellyfish/serverless-starter)! The starter kit is an opinionated boilerplate for a Serverless app running in AWS. It's been designed to offer as much future-proofing as possible, a tricky challenge in the fast-moving JavaScript ecosystem! Our starting point was the fantastic " [Modern Serverless Starter Kit](https://github.com/postlight/serverless-babel-starter)" by [Postlight](https://github.com/postlight). While that project has "modern" in the name we felt that we could safely go a bit closer to the cutting edge. ## [features permalink](/content/blog/introducing-our-serverless-starter-kit/#features/index.html) Features When designing the Serverless starter kit we had a few key requirements in mind which directly translate into features: - **Node 8 support**. This was a key one for us. AWS has [supported Node 8](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/compute/node-js-8-10-runtime-now-available-in-aws-lambda/) as a Lambda runtime environment since April 2018, bringing native support for a whole host of recent ECMAScript features (including async/await), performance improvements and reduced memory consumption thanks to the more recent version of V8. - **Webpack 4 support**. It was important that we could bundle our Lambda function code with Webpack to reduce the size of the package uploaded to AWS. [Webpack 4](https://medium.com/webpack/webpack-4-released-today-6cdb994702d4) is the latest and greatest version, offering major speed improvements and much simpler configuration compared to previous iterations. - **Babel 7 support**. This one is more a straightforward case of future-proofing. There's currently little technical reason to favour Babel 7 over the arguably more stable version 6 but it's fun to push the boundaries sometimes! - **Local development support**. If you have to deploy functions to AWS every time you make a change the developer experience is somewhat poor. Fortunately this problem has been solved by the [serverless-offline](https://github.com/dherault/serverless-offline) plugin which emulates AWS Lambda and API Gateway locally. - **Jest support**. Unit testing is important. [Jest](https://jestjs.io/) is, in our opinion, the best tool for the job. The starter kit includes Jest configuration to automatically collect code coverage information. - **ESLint configuration**. We're firm believers in [the need for consistent code](/content/blog/code-consistency-with-eslint-and-husky/index.html) and therefore the starter kit ships with a pre-configured ESLint set up, along with Husky and lint-staged to efficiently lint and auto-fix code at commit time. ## [usage permalink](/content/blog/introducing-our-serverless-starter-kit/#usage/index.html) Usage The Serverless CLI allows you to scaffold a new Serverless application from a template on GitHub. Run the following command to use our starter kit: ```sh serverless create --template-url https://github.com/orangejellyfish/serverless-starter --path your/local/path ``` ## [whats next permalink](/content/blog/introducing-our-serverless-starter-kit/#whats-next/index.html) What's next? We think that the feature set provided by this starter kit gives you a really solid start for any Serverless application but it's only the basics. Watch this space for more advanced kits, built upon this one, in the future, adding pre-configured support for things like DynamoDB. > [Check out the code on GitHub](https://github.com/orangejellyfish/serverless-starter)!