👁️ Watch Command Upgrade

[m0nikaza]

The new watch command introduces Local AWS Lambda Development, a new way of doing backend AWS Lambda development.

We introduced this because of two reasons:

• because it takes time for the changes to be deployed (sometimes more than a minute 😩), backend development is slow, inefficient, and frustrating
• inability to use debugger and inspect code while it's running makes things even harder

With the new approach, both of the above mentioned problems are resolved.

With the new approach, we're no longer continuously deploying the changes. Instead, when the webiny watch command is run, a new "local AWS Lambda development session" is started, which basically ensures that all AWS Lambda function invocations are forwarded to our local machine. With the invocations now happening on our machine, we get to run the code locally, meaning the changes are reflected as we make them, and we can also use the debugger to inspect the code while it's running. We first used this internally behind a feature flag to make sure it is working as expected. If you are interested in testing it with us, get in touch on Slack.

With the 5.41.0 release, we are releasing this to the community, hoping it will boost your DevEx.