Error running Sharp inside AWS Lambda function: darwin-x64' binaries cannot be used on the 'linux-x64' platform

Kudos to stdunbar for steering me in the right direction.

When installing sharp on MacOS via NPM the normal way (i.e.: npm i sharp --save), the installer automatically adds binaries for OS X. But AWS lambda functions run on Linux 2 machines with x64 processors and this is why we get this error.

To fix you must first uninstall sharp completely and then run:

npm install --arch=x64 --platform=linux sharp

Note:

version 0.25 no longer works with the target flag. This used to work:

npm install --arch=x64 --platform=linux --target=10.15.0 sharp

Then deploy as usual from Serverless Framework with sls deploy

Side Note:

Sharp is EXTREMELY FAST!!! Before using sharp, I was using another image resizing utility named Jimp. It did the job, but was quite slow. To prevent timeout errors, I had to increase the memory size from 128 to 512 and the timeout from 5 seconds to 30 seconds just to handle a typical 1 megabyte image.

Here is a comparison between the two for resizing a 1.2Mb picture down to 600x400 using the same configuration:

Jimp -> used 512Mb of memory and AWS billed me for 14300 ms.

Sharp -> used 132 MB of memory and AWS billed me for 800 ms.

That's more than 14x faster than Jimp!!!

I found an easier solution when building from MacOS or Windows, I use a Makefile with SAM and provide linux as a target for the NPM install.

template.yaml

  MyFunction:
    Type: AWS::Serverless::Function
    Properties:
      CodeUri: mycode/
      Handler: handler.handler
      Runtime: nodejs12.x
      MemorySize: 512
      Timeout: 5
      Role: !GetAtt EdgeLambdaRole.Arn
    Metadata:
        BuildMethod: makefile

mycode/makefile

build-MyFunction:
    cp *.js $(ARTIFACTS_DIR)
    cp package.json $(ARTIFACTS_DIR)
    cp package-lock.json $(ARTIFACTS_DIR)
    cd $(ARTIFACTS_DIR) && npm install --production --arch=x64 --platform=linux

Make sure you use TABS in your makefile