Building a Serverless React App with AWS Amplify

Introduction:

Serverless technology has become increasingly popular in recent years as a way to build and deploy applications without the need to manage infrastructure. In this blog post, we will look at how to build a serverless React app using AWS Amplify.

AWS Amplify is a development platform for building cloud-powered mobile and web applications. It provides a set of tools and services for building, deploying, and managing applications on AWS. One of the key features of AWS Amplify is its support for serverless functions, which allow you to run code in response to events such as HTTP requests or data changes in a database.

Setting Up AWS Amplify:

To get started with AWS Amplify, you will need to install the AWS Amplify CLI and configure it with your AWS account. You can install the CLI by running the following command:

Once the CLI is installed, you can configure it by running the amplify configure command and following the prompts. This will create an IAM user with the necessary permissions to deploy resources to your AWS account.

Creating a React App:

To create a new React app with AWS Amplify, you can use the amplify init and amplify add hosting commands. The amplify init command will create an Amplify project in your current directory and set up the necessary AWS resources. The amplify add hosting command will add hosting support to your project and create an S3 bucket to host your static assets.

Here is an example of how you can create a new React app with AWS Amplify:

This command will create an S3 bucket with the specified name and configure it to host your React app. You can then create a new React app using the create-react-app command and start building your application.

Once you have created your React app, you can add it to your Amplify project by running the amplify add hosting command again and selecting the React option. This will configure your React app for hosting with Amplify and add the necessary dependencies to your project.

Creating a Serverless Function:

To create a serverless function with AWS Amplify, you can use the amplify add function command. This command will create a new Lambda function and configure it to be triggered by a specific event, such as an HTTP request or a data change in a database.

Here is an example of how you can create a serverless function with AWS Amplify:

This command will create a new Lambda function with the specified name and a simple “Hello World” template. You can then edit the function code in the src/lambda/myFunction directory.

To invoke your server to invoke your serverless function from a React component, you can use the useAmplifyAuth hook from the @aws-amplify/auth library. This hook provides access to the Amplify object, which you can use to invoke your serverless function.

Here is an example of how you can invoke a serverless function from a React component using the useAmplifyAuth hook:

In this example, we are using the invokeLambdaFunction method of the Amplify object to invoke our myFunction serverless function. We are passing in some data as a parameter and logging the response or error to the console.

Deploying Your App:

To deploy your React app and serverless functions to AWS, you can use the amplify publish command. This command will build your app, package your serverless functions, and deploy everything to your AWS account.

Once your app is deployed, you can access it using the URL provided by Amplify. You can also view the logs for your serverless functions in the AWS CloudWatch console.

Conclusion:

In this blog post, we have seen how to build a serverless React app using AWS Amplify. We covered setting up AWS Amplify, creating a React app, creating a serverless function, and deploying the app to AWS. With AWS Amplify, you can easily build and deploy cloud-powered applications without the need to manage infrastructure.