I have a Lambda function tied to the AWS API gateway. When I call it with something like /foo/bar and bar does not exist, my function returns (correctly) something like:

I now want the status code of this to be 404, too, but following the tutorials I could find on the net, I had no success so far. What I did:

I created a method response for 404 that looks like this:

And in the integration response, I set the following:

To my understanding, this should set the code to 404 when 404 appears in the response document, but I still get 200.

What am I missing?

I investigated some more and found out that the API gateway is very picky about where it expects its error messages, and how I have to get them out.

It is deeply buried and not easily found in the documentation that the errorMessage property is considered for matching against the Lambda Error Regex, and the first answer to this post states you have to throw an exception when using Java 8. I use .net for my Lambda function, so I did this very simple thing:

then I set up the Lambda Error Regex 404 and it worked.

Next thing I tried was:

With the regex .*404.* it still worked.

Now comes the thing: I tried to emit a JSON object as the error, but I found nothing in C# or F# to let me do this, so I came up with the following:

And boom, I got 200 again.

So I conclude from this, AWS doesn’t like stringified JSON in the errorMessage property, so I now just output a simple string like this:

and using the regex 404:.*, it now works. That means, I somehow have to construct my desired output object using the mappings in the API gateway.

This is quite inconvenient and something easy to trip over…