How to Debug .NET Core Lambda Functions Locally with the Serverless Framework

As most developers would know, debugging is one of those tasks which can make life a whole lot easier when trying to identify that mind boggling issue occurring in code. For some time now the Serverless Framework has had the ability to locally invoke Lambda Functions written in NodeJS, Python, Java and Ruby or run them locally using the serverless-offline plugin (and a number of variants such as the one for Python). To date, this has seemed extremely difficult for .NET Core developers to do. Myself and other developers I know of who write in .NET have resorted to just logging everything to console, building and deploying to AWS to see what is going wrong.

Now things have changed, as part of 0.9.0 release of the AWS .NET Mock Lambda Test Tool you can now debug your .NET Core Lambda Functions created within the serverless framework — let me show you how!

Install the tools

Some of these steps are based on the setup guide provided in the tools themselves, I’ll also be setting up for Visual Studio Code which is the tool I use to develop .NET Lambda functions — Visual Studio and JetBrains Rider support is also available.

The tools can be installed by running the the dotnet tool install command — keeping in mind this is a global tool…