Getting started with AWS amplify

Intro to AWS amplify and using it to simplify provisioning of required resources by using cloudformation and infrastructure as code.

It is a framework (Libraries, CLI, UI, Components) to simplify use of underlying aws services. There are no additional charges for using the amplify framework. So we can consider it as a utility to simplify creation of resources in the cloud using aws cloudformation and integrating them with our application.

Getting Started

1. we will have to first install amplify cli npm i -g @aws-amplify/cli
2. Configure it with amplify configure
3. Now go to project and run amplify init
4. Now you can start adding the required features for eg auth amplify add auth
5. Once you answer all the questions of cli, it will create local backend resources.
6. So the next step will be to push this to cloud and provision aws resources in the cloud for our project by running amplify push
7. If their is a build step involved to release next version of app then run amplify publish

For a react application we can go with the following steps

1. yarn add aws-amplify @aws-amplify/ui-react -S
2. In the app root which gets loaded first we need to import and initiate aws amplify service.

import Amplify, { Auth } from 'aws-amplify'
import awsconfig from '../aws-exports'

3. Now we can wrap aur App with withAuthenticator HOC to provide us the login interface

import { withAuthenticator } from '@aws-amplify/ui-react'
...
export default withAuthenticator(App)

That's it this will now give a login interface which will validate our users as per the user pool created during amplify add auth step.

4. For logout we can use Auth service of amplify like this

const handleLogout = () => {
  Auth.signOut()
}

or make use of signout component provided by amplify

import { AmplifySignOut } from '@aws-amplify/ui-react'
...
      <AmplifySignOut />
...

I however, ran into a painful issue -

When deploying the front-end app, aws-exports.js file is git ignored then build fails because this file is not found. Hence either do amplifyPush on the build step or use the better option I think and I use is to use values from aws-exports.js in an environment variable and then import that from env variable instead of from aws-export.js file

Let me know your feedback/suggestions in the comments.

- Ayush 🙂