Installation

You can clone the completed project from GitHub↗ to follow along or use it as a reference.

Getting your environment ready is usually the most annoying part of learning something new. For Rust on Lambda, you need a few specific tools to handle the building and deployment process.

Here is exactly what you need to install based on your OS.

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh

curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
unzip awscliv2.zip
sudo ./aws/install

wget https://github.com/aws/aws-sam-cli/releases/latest/download/aws-sam-cli-linux-x86_64.zip
unzip aws-sam-cli-linux-x86_64.zip -d sam-installation
sudo ./sam-installation/install

pip3 install cargo-lambda

Handling cross-compilation

AWS Lambda runs on Linux. If you're developing on a Mac or Windows, you need to tell Rust how to build code for that specific Linux environment.

cargo-lambda handles most of this, but you still need to add the target to your toolchain:

rustup target add x86_64-unknown-linux-musl

Check if everything works

Run these in your terminal to make sure everything is ready:

• rustc --version
• aws --version
• sam --version
• cargo lambda --version

At the point of writing this, my development version is:

• rustc: 1.94.1
• aws: 2.17.32 Python/3.11.9 Linux/6.17.0-19-generic exe/x86_64.ubuntu.24
• aws-sam-cli: 1.142.1
• cargo-lambda: 1.8.6

Now that everything is set up, we can actually start building something. In the next post, we'll use AWS SAM to create our first project.