Amplify-cli: CI workflow: Canonical 'Headless' usage of the CLI

[ambientlight]

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Headless usage of the CLI

While setting up CI workflow I followed headless_configure_project with a simple usecase of pushing the backend resources changes with amplify push.

Presented example:

REACTCONFIG="{\
\"SourceDir\":\"src\",\
\"DistributionDir\":\"dist\",\
\"BuildCommand\":\"npm run-script build\",\
\"StartCommand\":\"npm run-script start\"\
}"

AWSCLOUDFORMATIONCONFIG="{\
\"configLevel\":\"project\",\
\"useProfile\":true,\
\"profileName\":\"default\",\
\"accessKeyId\":\"$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID\",\
\"secretAccessKey\":\"$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY\",\
\"region\":\"ap-southeast-1\"\
}"

AMPLIFY="{\
\"projectName\":\"headlessProjectName\",\
\"defaultEditor\":\"code\"\
}"
FRONTEND="{\
\"frontend\":\"javascript\",\
\"framework\":\"react\",\
\"config\":$REACTCONFIG\
}"

PROVIDERS="{\
\"awscloudformation\":$AWSCLOUDFORMATIONCONFIG\
}"

./node_modules/.bin/amplify configure project --amplify $AMPLIFY --frontend $FRONTEND --providers $PROVIDERS

fails with SyntaxError: Unexpected end of JSON input.
Changing $FRONTEND to project_config.json exact structure also fails:

JAVASCRIPT_CONFIG="{\
\"framework\":\"react\",\
\"config\":$REACTCONFIG\
}"

FRONTEND="{\
\"projectName\":\"magicproj\",\
\"version\":\"2.0\",\
\"frontend\":\"javascript\",\
\"javascript\":$JAVASCRIPT_CONFIG,\
\"providers\":[\"awscloudformation\"]\
}"

Not specifying --frontend $FRONTEND would have this error gone, now CLI would complain about non-existence of ./amplify/.config/local-env-info.json and ./amplify/backend/amplify-meta.json (using default amplify initialized project with default .gitignore).

After committing ./amplify/backend/amplify-meta.json to git and generating ./amplify/.config/local-env-info.json it does work with:

REACTCONFIG="{\
\"SourceDir\":\"src\",\
\"DistributionDir\":\"dist\",\
\"BuildCommand\":\"npm run-script build\",\
\"StartCommand\":\"npm run-script start\"\
}"

AWSCLOUDFORMATIONCONFIG="{\
\"configLevel\":\"project\",\
\"useProfile\":false,\
\"accessKeyId\":\"$AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID\",\
\"secretAccessKey\":\"$AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY\",\
\"region\":\"ap-southeast-1\"\
}"

AMPLIFY="{\
\"projectName\":\"magicproj\",\
\"defaultEditor\":\"code\"\
}"

PROVIDERS="{\
\"awscloudformation\":$AWSCLOUDFORMATIONCONFIG\
}"

echo '{"projectPath": "'"$(pwd)"'","defaultEditor":"code","envName":"dev"}' > ./amplify/.config/local-env-info.json
./node_modules/.bin/amplify configure project --amplify $AMPLIFY --providers $PROVIDERS --yes
./node_modules/.bin/amplify env pull --yes
./node_modules/.bin/amplify push --yes

My question is: Am I doing a right thing here? It looks a bit cumbersome and I wasn't actually able to find any documentation on this except headless-usage-of-the-cli. Another question: why is ./amplify/backend/amplify-meta.json is in default .gitignore.?

[kaustavghosh06]

@ambientlight

you might want to take a look at some sample headless scripts out here - https://github.com/aws-amplify/amplify-cli/blob/master/packages/amplify-cli/sample-headless-scripts/headless_push.sh

[ambientlight]

@kaustavghosh06: yeah I have followed them. I wonder if scripts for configure project are outdated.

we can store all the jsons needed by configure projects into ci_config.json in the repository and then feed it to amplify configure project with jq, but isn't it's what should be done on amplify side, it feels a bit strange feeding jsons to cli, so I wonder if this is the only way to do this?

[kaustavghosh06]

@ambientlight Thanks for the feedback. What we could probably do is introduce a flag -c which accepts a config file path and read the JSON from the that file. Something like amplify push -c <file-path>. Do you think that would be a better approach?

[ambientlight]

@kaustavghosh06: yes, that would be an improvement definitely.

Also another possibility would be to have all minimal configuration consolidated in /amplify/.config/project-config.json. Then we won't need to pass anything to amplify push at all.

Say without AWSCLOUDFORMATIONCONFIG set cli can use AWS_PROFILE or AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID , AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY , AWS_DEFAULT_REGION environment variables.