TL;DR: You can disable tracing by setting the environment variable DISABLE_XRAY_TRACING=1

I was using serverless-offline to emulate my Serverless app locally.

But when I made a request to my endpoint, I received the error:

Error: Missing AWS Lambda trace data for X-Ray. Expected _X_AMZN_TRACE_ID to be set.

I noticed this was coming from aws-xray-sdk-core.

I found an issue that recommended setting the environment variable AWS_XRAY_CONTEXT_MISSING to LOG_ERROR:

AWS_XRAY_CONTEXT_MISSING=LOG_ERROR

I was able to access my endpoint without a 500 internal server error, but the error stacktrace was still logged to my console. This made debugging difficult.

So I tried setting the environment variable _X_AMZN_TRACE_ID to 0:

_X_AMZN_TRACE_ID=0

Here, the only error in my console was:

_X_AMZN_TRACE_ID is missing required data.

Ultimately, I turned off tracing by setting the environment variable DISABLE_XRAY_TRACING to 1:

DISABLE_XRAY_TRACING=1

This was the solution I chose for local development.