Serverless-sam is a plugin for the Serverless framework that makes it easy to create Serverless Application Model (SAM) templates from an application. The plugin adds the sam command to the serverless cli.

From your Serverless application directory, use npm to install the plugin:

$ npm install --save-dev serverless-sam

Once you have installed the plugin, add it to your serverless.yml file in the plugins sections.

service: my-serverless-service

plugins:
  - serverless-sam

frameworkVersion: ">=1.1.0 <2.0.0"
...

Use the sam export command to generate a SAM definition from your service. Use the --output or -o option to set the name for the SAM template file.

$ serverless sam export --output ./sam-template.yml

Once you have exported the template, you can follow the standard procedure with the AWS CLI to deploy the service. First, the package command reads the generated templates, uploads the packaged functions to an S3 bucket for deployment, and generates an output template with the S3 links to the function packages.

$ aws cloudformation package \
    --template-file /path_to_template/template.yaml \
    --s3-bucket bucket-name \
    --output-template-file packaged-template.yaml

The next step is to deploy the output template from the package command:

$ aws cloudformation deploy \
    --template-file /path_to_template/packaged-template.yaml \
    --stack-name my-new-stack \
    --capabilities CAPABILITY_IAM