Getting headless Chrome to run on AWS Lambda Node

4 years ago

Today I needed to update a couple Lambda functions from the Node 8 runtime to use the Node 10.x runtime. These functions required headless Chrome because they are used to take screenshots. Unfortunately, moving from the Node 8 runtime to 10x runtime is not a simple as it sounds, because AWS have decided to change the Linux environment which now excludes some files that Chromium requires to run.

As a reminder to myself, and for anyone else who might find it useful, I thought I’d document my setup here in a blog post. This post will assume you have the Serverless CLI set up and successfully deploying to AWS.

Saving a Canvas element as an image

4 years ago

Here’s a little tip to allow your users download the contents of a canvas element as an image, without the need for a server. We can do this by using an Anchor tag with a download attribute.

Start with creating <canvas> and <a> tags:

<canvas id="mycanvas"></canvas>
<a href="#" download="MyImage.png" id="downloadlink">Save canvas</a>

The <a> tag’s download attribute can be set to a file name that will be used when saving the file. If no value is specified, it will just be called Download.png.