dropthejase ditches containers for a lighter backend

The Louis fork swaps a Docker-based deployment for a simpler bundle-and-ship setup, and cleans the kitchen on the way out.

infrastructure

dropthejase has reversed an earlier architectural bet. The backend that powers Louis used to ship as a container - a heavier packaging format that needs Docker installed on every developer's machine and a hand-written deploy script to push it to AWS. The team has now moved to a plain zipped bundle, letting AWS's own infrastructure-as-code tools handle the assembly. The bespoke deploy script is gone, replaced by a single standard command.

Along the way, the team trimmed unused document-handling libraries, upgraded the underlying runtime to a current version, and turned on the settings that make production crashes actually debuggable rather than appearing as a wall of mangled code. The database engine was also bumped to a newer Postgres release.

It's the kind of housekeeping that doesn't change what users see but materially changes how fast the team can ship and diagnose problems.

So what Worth a look for anyone evaluating Louis-derived stacks for production legal-tech work - this is a fork that's tightening its operational backbone, not just adding features.

View this fork on GitHub →

Spotted something wrong? Or know the PR text has fresher detail than the writeup above?

Commits in this thread

7 commits from dropthejase/louis, oldest first. Source extracted verbatim from the harvested git log.

SHA Subject Author Date
1b2f80df feat: migrate backend Lambda to ZIP, bump Aurora to Postgres 17.9 Jason Lee 2026-05-11 ↗ GitHub
db5d0922 fix: use NodejsFunction for backend Lambda (esbuild, no Docker) Jason Lee 2026-05-11 ↗ GitHub
8d7ebdd1 fix: add esbuild bundling config with nodeModules for heavy deps Jason Lee 2026-05-11 ↗ GitHub
3f8db07b fix: remove unused docx dep from backend Lambda Jason Lee 2026-05-11 ↗ GitHub
09dc5767 fix: remove unnecessary nodeModules list from esbuild bundling config Jason Lee 2026-05-11 ↗ GitHub
bfae17c3 fix: keep pdfjs-dist as nodeModule (dynamic .mjs import unsafe for esbuild) Jason Lee 2026-05-11 ↗ GitHub
60fa124d chore(infra): upgrade API Lambda to Node 22, disable minify, enable source maps Jason Lee 2026-05-13 ↗ GitHub
Adds @aws-sdk/client-bedrock-runtime to externalModules to prevent
esbuild TDZ bug that caused ReferenceError on BedrockRuntimeClient init.

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