Prisma challenges with Next.js in AWS Amplify

Started new project together with some friends and we decided to against AWS Amplify together with Next.js and Prisma. I have worked with Next.js and Prisma in many of my projects before and felt confident about that setup. But boy this AWS Amplify thing was something totally new for me. AWS is totally new for me but the others have been working and deploying things there before and would be a great project to start learning about it.

But everything didn't went as smooth as I/we hoped. Where should I start?

Static generation

Our first plan where to generate everything statically but we had to much data for that so the build process took to long time and in some cases it timed out or got weird memory leak 0xa1855c node::OnFatalError(char const*, char const*) [node] which we didn't managed to solve. So we went with ISG together with Next.js instead and rest of this post will be about that.

Prisma together with AWS Lambda

Oh boy this one was a tough one for me. First of all we seemed to got a versioned that didn't work but after Prisma release 3.5.0 we got rid of some of the first build errors. Then with also got build errors about _http_common and the solutions I found were to add following to next.config.js

next.config.js

(module.exports = {
  "webpack": (config, {defaultLoaders, isServer}) => {
    if (isServer) {
      config.externals.push("_http_common")
    }

    return config
  }
})

Oh and of course you have to specified what binary to target so it can run in a Lambda so you have to add binaryTargets to your

prisma/schema.prisma

binaryTargets = ['native', 'rhel-openssl-1.0.x']

After that everything build correctly but we didn't got 503 Reponses on every Lambda request and looking into the logs we could see

{
  "errorType": "Error",
  "errorMessage": "ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/var/task/chunks/schema.prisma'",
  "code": "ENOENT",
  "errno": -2,
  "syscall": "open",
  "path": "/var/task/chunks/schema.prisma",
  "clientVersion": "3.5.0",
  "stack": [
    "Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/var/task/chunks/schema.prisma'",
    "    at Object.openSync (fs.js:497:3)",
    "    at Object.readFileSync (fs.js:393:35)",
    "    at new LibraryEngine (/var/task/chunks/836.js:36276:40)",
    "    at PrismaClient.getEngine (/var/task/chunks/836.js:39478:16)",
    "    at new PrismaClient (/var/task/chunks/836.js:39449:29)",
    "    at Object.21010 (/var/task/chunks/449.js:15:33)",
    "    at __webpack_require__ (/var/task/pages/[county]/[municipality]/[area].js:551:43)",
    "    at Module.98288 (/var/task/pages/[county]/[municipality]/[area].js:20:69)",
    "    at __webpack_require__ (/var/task/pages/[county]/[municipality]/[area].js:551:43)",
    "    at Module.55135 (/var/task/pages/[county]/[municipality]/[area].js:278:23)"
  ]
}

and what conclusion can make about that? That Prisma didn't got packed into the Lambda artifact and didn't exist when it executing. For that we found a solutions what Vercel themself are using and what platforms such Netlify are using for getting Next.js to work in theirs environments.

next.config.js

(module.exports = {
  "target": "experimental-serverless-trace",
})

Everything good now? Nahh! Now we faced that Prisma executed as expected but couldn't connect to the database because it couldn't find the DATABASE_URL-variable from the .env. Ok why not? I some weird way the Lambda do not gets the Environments Variables set in Amplify GUI. So how to solve it?

amplify.yml

...
  build:
    commands:
      - echo "DATABASE_URL=$DATABASE_URL" >> .env
...

In other words you have to create a .env in build time to get the Lambda to pick it up. And this is the official solution to the problem as you can read about in the Amplify docs

Now everything is working as attended but next problem is to fix Too Many Connections problem we are facing with Prisma and the Lambda right now where it's don't letting the connections go.

Prisma is a lovely framework I have been pleased with but in this context it's have been such a pain. We are actually looking into to user serverless/mysl right now to see if we can get a better handling of our connections. And that's a shame we maybe can't get all the benefits from Prisma.

Why writing this post if you going elsewhere?

Because you maybe have the same use cases where you have to have many SSG rendering stuff and therefor it won't be a problem for you. And this made a headache for me so hope it can help you in someway.