This week, I spent a lot of time trying to connect to databases. Or rather, I wasted a lot of time trying to connect to databases. An AWS Amplify application caused me quite a headache, so I wanted to provide a simple walkthrough to help troubleshoot some of the issues I was facing.
Prerequisites
To start, there are three packages that you will need get get things going: 1. @aws-amplify-cli; 2. @aws-amplify; 3. the most recent version of AWS CLI. You will also need an AWS account.
Getting Going
I was working with an existing Github repo, so I cloned that repo to my local machine and accessed a working branch. To configure access to the AWS resources, you will need to run amplify configure. This command requires you to log into your AWS account and configure the access permissions through an IAM account. When going through these steps, you will be prompted to set a region. It is essential that the AWS region you choose matches the region configured in the application. You can find this information in the repo's team-provider-info.json
You will also have to enter credentials for the IAM account that are produced in the AWS management console. These include an access key and a secret key. Take note of these in a secure location, though you can always produce a new one in the event that you lose it.
In theory, everything should be working from here and you can just run amplify init to connect things. When I ran amplify init, I hit the following error.
Initializing your environment: dev(node:22264) UnhandledPromiseRejectionWarning: InvalidAccessKeyId: The AWS Access Key Id you provided does not exist in our records.
This is one of those programming things where you want to beat your head against a wall. I just told you the access key, why do you have to lose it? I tried going through the amplify configure steps again, to no avail.
(An aside on amplify configure. The amplify configure command menu creates the impression you are always adding a new user, when in fact it is a way of updating a user (see this pull request for a more thorough discussion.)
In the prerequisites, I mentioned installing the AWS CLI tools. This allowed me to diagnosis and fix the problem. If you run aws configure, it will show you the last 4 characters of both the saved access key ID and secret access key, as well as the selected region. If any of this looks different from what you input aws configure, this is the place to change it. I updated the values here, and voila. I ran amplify init, and things were working.
TL;DR
In summary, ensure you have the prerequisites. Run amplify configure, then amplify init and then run your app. Run aws configure if things are not going right and then check your credentials.
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