Lambda function from container - Missing Parent Directory

Question

I've a built a container image that I'm able to execute locally.  The container works well with `aws-lambda-rie`.

However, when trying to create lambda function in the console with it, I encounter:

"Failed to create the function xxxxxx : MissingParentDirectory: Parent directory does not exist for file: ./usr/share/doc/ca-certificates/copyright"

The folder exists on the container. What could be causing this error? Are there other undocumented requirements for containers to be lambda compatible?

Answer

We tracked down the issue to distroless - https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless/blob/3cfaaa01d9e53c2cd17b9fba8e3877981f5b4349/cacerts/cacerts.bzl#L31

Tar layer created with a file under /usr/share/doc/ca-certificates/copyright but without including empty folders for the tree structure leading up to it /usr, /usr/share, ... etc was causing the issue.

Answer

In our case the same error was seemingly caused by the missing directory entries in the image filesystem. You can verify their presence by first doing `docker export` to tar file:
```
docker image ls
# find out the image you need
docker create --name="image-export" 
docker export "image-export" > "image-export.tar"
docker rm "image-export"
```
and then listing its contents via `tar tf image-export.tar`. The example ouput below contains directory entries (lines ending with "/") 
```
app/
app/app.bin
bin/
bin/bash
bin/cat
```
The image having those lines in `tar tf` output was working properly on Lambda while the image that haven't had them failed with error message similar to what you've encountered.

Lambda function from container - Missing Parent Directory

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