Outline

Introduction
Setup
Project Structure
- App Component
Initialize Amplify Project
- Deploy to CloudFront and S3

All of this project's code can be found in the First Look monorepo on my GitHub.

Introduction

AWS Amplify is a set of tools and services to help frontend web and mobile developers build scalable fullstack applications with AWS infrastructure that includes:

Amplify Console for managing frontend web app, backend environments, CI/CD, and the Admin UI
Amplify CLI for creating and deploying CloudFormation stacks
Open source libraries for JavaScript, iOS, Android, and Flutter
Admin UI for modeling data, adding authentication, authorization and managing users and groups

With these tools combined, Amplify has achieved a unique synecdoche¹ by creating their own opinionated version of AWS within AWS itself.

Setup

This tutorial will follow the Getting Started guide for React from the Amplify documentation, except we will be using Vite and the officially supported React template instead of create-react-app. This way the kids will know that I am, "with it."

Configure AWS CLI

Make sure you have the AWS CLI installed and an AWS account. For general use, aws configure is recommended as the fastest way to set up your AWS CLI installation.

aws configure

When you enter this command, the AWS CLI prompts you for four pieces of information:

Access key ID
Secret access key
AWS Region
Output format

Go to My Security Credentials to find your Access Key ID, Secret Access Key, and default region. You can leave the output format blank.

AWS Access Key ID: <YOUR_ACCESS_KEY_ID>
AWS Secret Access Key: <YOUR_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY>
Default region name: <YOUR_REGION_NAME>
Default output format [None]:

Install Amplify CLI

npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli

Initialize Project

You need a React app, which means first you have to create one. You could do the sensible thing and use a tool literally called create-react-app, or you could listen to a random person on the internet and use this thing you've never heard of and have no idea how to pronounce. If you're not convinced you can refer to this blog post from the aforementioned random person on the internet.

Vite (French word for "fast", pronounced /vit/, rhymes with "street") is a build tool that aims to provide a faster and leaner development experience for modern web projects. It consists of two parts:

A dev server with Hot Module Replacement (HMR)
A build command that bundles your code with Rollup, pre-configured to output highly optimized static assets for production

yarn create @vitejs/app ajcwebdev-amplify --template react

Output:

success Installed "@vitejs/create-app@2.2.5" with binaries:
      - create-app
      - cva

Scaffolding project in /Users/ajcwebdev/ajcwebdev-amplify...

Done. Now run:

  cd ajcwebdev-amplify
  yarn
  yarn dev

✨  Done in 2.18s.

Start Development Server

cd ajcwebdev-amplify
yarn
yarn dev

  vite v2.2.4 dev server running at:

  > Local:    http://localhost:3000/
  > Network:  http://10.0.0.175:3000/

  ready in 668ms.

You could click the counter. Or you could not click the counter and instead live the rest of life wondering whether it actually would have incremented or not.

Project Structure

├── src
│   ├── App.css
│   ├── App.jsx
│   ├── index.css
│   └── main.jsx
├── .gitignore
├── index.html
├── package.json
├── vite.config.js
└── yarn.lock

Our package.json includes scripts for starting the development server, building for production, and serving local previews of production builds.

{
  "name": "ajcwebdev-amplify",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "vite",
    "build": "vite build",
    "serve": "vite preview"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "react": "^17.0.0",
    "react-dom": "^17.0.0"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@vitejs/plugin-react-refresh": "^1.3.1",
    "vite": "^2.2.3"
  }
}

App Component

// src/App.jsx

import React, { useState } from 'react'
import logo from './logo.svg'
import './App.css'

function App() {
  const [count, setCount] = useState(0)

  return (
    <div className="App">
      <header className="App-header">
        <img
          src={logo}
          className="App-logo"
          alt="logo"
        />

        <p>Hello Vite + React!</p>

        <p>
          <button onClick={() => setCount((count) => count + 1)}>
            count is: {count}
          </button>
        </p>

        <p>
          Edit <code>App.jsx</code> and save to test HMR updates.
        </p>

        <p>
          <a
            className="App-link"
            href="https://reactjs.org"
            target="_blank"
            rel="noopener noreferrer"
          >
            Learn React
          </a>

          {' | '}

          <a
            className="App-link"
            href="https://vitejs.dev/guide/features.html"
            target="_blank"
            rel="noopener noreferrer"
          >
            Vite Docs
          </a>
        </p>
      </header>
    </div>
  )
}

export default App

Include links to your own social accounts.

// src/App.jsx

import React from 'react'
import logo from './logo.svg'
import './App.css'

function App() {
  return (
    <div className="App">
      <header className="App-header">
        <img
          src={logo}
          className="App-logo"
          alt="logo"
        />

        <p>ajcwebdev</p>

        <p>Amplify + Vite</p>

        <p>
          <a
            href="https://dev.to/ajcwebdev"
            target="_blank"
            rel="noopener noreferrer"
          >
            Blog
          </a>

          {' | '}

          <a
            href="https://github.com/ajcwebdev"
            target="_blank"
            rel="noopener noreferrer"
          >
            GitHub
          </a>
        </p>
      </header>
    </div>
  )
}

export default App

Initialize Amplify Project

To initialize a new Amplify project, run amplify init from the root directory of your frontend app.

amplify init

? Enter a name for the project ajcwebdevamplify
? Enter a name for the environment dev
? Choose your default editor: Visual Studio Code
? Choose the type of app that you're building javascript

Please tell us about your project
? What javascript framework are you using react
? Source Directory Path:  src
? Distribution Directory Path: dist
? Build Command:  yarn build
? Start Command: yarn dev

Using default provider  awscloudformation

? Select the authentication method you want to use: AWS profile

For more information on AWS Profiles, see:
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-configure-profiles.html

? Please choose the profile you want to use default

Deploy to CloudFront and S3

amplify add hosting

? Select the plugin module to execute Amazon CloudFront and S3
? Select the environment setup: DEV (S3 only with HTTP)
? hosting bucket name ajcwebdevamplify-20210509181751-hostingbucket
? index doc for the website index.html
? error doc for the website index.html

You can now publish your app using the following command:
Command: amplify publish

amplify publish

✔ Successfully pulled backend environment dev from the cloud.

Current Environment: dev

| Category | Resource name   | Operation | Provider plugin   |
| -------- | --------------- | --------- | ----------------- |
| Hosting  | S3AndCloudFront | Create    | awscloudformation |

? Are you sure you want to continue? Yes