Your first deployment

This guide walks you through deploying a small Express app to AWS Lambda with alk.

1. Initialise Alkaia in your AWS account

The first time you use Alkaia, it deploys a small control-plane stack into your AWS account. This is a one-time setup.

alk setup

alk shows you exactly what will be created and asks for confirmation before applying any changes.

2. Create a stack file

A stack describes what you want to deploy. In your project root, create my-app.stack.yaml:

name: my-app
runtime: nodejs22
entry: index.js

3. Deploy

alk deploy my-app.stack.yaml

Alkaia packages your code, uploads it, and provisions the necessary AWS resources. The CLI shows progress for each step and prints the public URL of your app at the end.

4. Tear down (optional)

To remove everything Alkaia created for this stack:

alk teardown my-app

You’ll be asked to type destroy to confirm.

Next step

Browse the full alk command reference.