The latest preview version of Chalice, our microframework for Python serverless application development, now includes a couple of commonly requested features:

• Customizing the HTTP response. A new Response class, chalice.Response, enables you to customize the HTTP response by specifying the status code, body, and a mapping of HTTP headers to return. The tutorial in the chalice documentation shows how to use this new functionality to return a non-JSON response to the user.
• Vendoring binary packages. You can create a top-level vendor/ directory in your application source directory. This vendor directory is automatically included as part of the AWS Lambda deployment package when you deploy your application. You can use this feature for any private Python packages that can’t be specified in your requirements.txt file, as well as any binary content that includes Python packages with C extensions. For more information, see the packaging docs.

Let’s look at the first feature in more detail.

Customizing the HTTP Response

The following example shows a view function that returns a plain text response to the user.

from chalice import Chalice, Response

app = Chalice(app_name='helloworld')

@app.route('/')
def hello_world():
    return Response(
        status_code=200,
        body='hello world',
        headers={'Content-Type': 'text/plain'})

The existing default behavior of returning a JSON response is still preserved. To return a JSON response, you can just return the equivalent Python value directly from your view function.

from chalice import Chalice, Response

app = Chalice(app_name='helloworld')

@app.route('/')
def hello_world():
    return {'hello': 'world'}

You can also use this chalice.Response classto return HTTP redirects to users. In this view function, we accept a URL in the response body and generate a redirect to that URL:

from chalice import Chalice, Response

app = Chalice(app_name='redirect')

@app.route('/redirect', content_types=['text/plain'])
def hello_world():
    url = app.current_request.raw_body.strip()
    return Response(
        status_code=301,
        body='',
        headers={'Location': url})

See the 0.6.0 upgrade notes for more information.

Try out the latest version of Chalice today and let us know what you think. You can chat with us on our gitter channel and file feature requests on our github repo. We look forward to your feedback and suggestions.