I spent my last week figuring this out. I tried several of the open source packages mentioned above including jaws and node-lambda. In the end, I use node-lambd

I spent my last week figuring this out. I tried several of the open source packages mentioned above including jaws and node-lambda. In the end, I use node-lambda for local testing. If you configure your package.json file correctly you can get VS Code to run and debug, which was a life-changer for me. However, "node-lambda deploy" was breaking something between the API Gateway and Lambda, so eventually I switched to using a package.json deploy script that uses the AWS command line to zip & upload the working directory.