The last step in almost any software project is deploying your application to end users. If you ever deployed an application before, you know it can be tedious and time-consuming. Luckily by using AWS Amplify, we can streamline this process.

In a previous post, we built a Gatsby blog. I’ll be using this codebase for deployment.

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Install Amplify

To get started, we need to install the amplify CLI:

npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli

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Configure Amplify

run:

amplify configure

NOTE: this will open your default browser and ask you to log in to your AWS administrator account.

Once authenticated, pick your region:

Set your username: hot-new-blog-amplify

NOTE: this will open your default browser to this page, click the Next: Permissions button:

Next, you’ll see a page like:

You can click the Next: Tags button.

Next:

Click the Next: Review button.

Next:

Click create user.

Next:

Copy the Access key and Secret key. You’ll need to paste these into the terminal for the next step.

Paste in your access key:

Paste in your secret key:

Give your new profile a valid name: blog-amplify:

Initialize Amplify for our project

Next we will setup amplify for our specific project. We will deploy our Gatsby blog using CloudFront and S3.

first run:

amplify init

use these defaults:

In a few moments, you should see:

Add hosting to our Amplify project

We’re almost there. This is the last step before we have a production-ready blog!

Let’s add hosting to our project:

amplify hosting add

Select these options:

Next, run:

amplify publish

NOTE: this step can take 10-15 minutes to complete.

In the background, AWS amplify is using CloudFormation to build out our infrastructure. If you’re curious to see what the template looks like you can browse: amplify/backend/hosting/S3AndCloudFront/template.json

At this point, you should be presented with your production url:

Congrats. You have successfully deployed your blog!

This url is pretty ugly. You’ll probably want to add a CNAME record in your DNS registrar.