The Basics

AWS Amplify is a command-line utility that generates web and mobile applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers. It is written in node and requires NodeJS. My recommendation is to use nvm to install NodeJS if you’re installing NodeJS for the first time.

Use Cases

  • You posted your app idea on Craigslist, but no developers are willing to work for free, so you’ll do it yourself!
  • You want to create a proof of concept application quickly.
  • You would like to evaluate several different technologies without having to learn the internals.
  • You want to do something more than basic form collection.

You might want to evaluate Honeycode if you’re doing data collection from web and mobile platforms.

Installation

The latest and greatest installation instructions for a react application work well from beginning to end. The last time I tried to learn AWS Amplify and follow the AWS Amplify instructions, it ended in a whole lot of errors. This time around, everything worked as expected.

Amplify Choices

When creating an amplify application, you can build either a web or a mobile application. In the case of mobile applications, you can base your apps on web frameworks like React and Ionic and gain the ability to manipulate system-level APIs.

Amplify Console

Running this command pops you into the AWS console.

amplify console

I’ve found that clicking on the app name after running this command is the most helpful route. I’m able to get to the project’s build status since I decided to automate my deployment with a GitHub repository.

Push

If you’re looking to update your API, you’ll want to push up the changes with this command.

amplify push

Update

If you’ve made changes to your schema, you’ll want to update your API.

Run this command to push the changes and generate your schema.

amplify update api

Wrapping Up

I wrote a short article because there isn’t much to explain with AWS Amplify at a high level. It can get complicated when you’re working to keep your resources in order. AWS Amplify will fit the bill if you’re not looking to do something complex and want to do some data collection with a few bells and whistles.

Learn AWS Amplify - Beyond the Basics

So far, there aren’t many resources for learning AWS Amplify, but here are a few.