AWS Programming Tools Melbourne Meetup — Serverless Gatsby Site with AWS Amplify in Cloud9
Last night I joined the AWS Programming Tools Melbourne meetup for a workshop on creating a serverless Gatsby blog site using AWS Amplify, GitHub and Apollo GraphQL via AppSync. The workshop was very professional with a lot of strong technicians supporting the attendees. The organisers Daghan, Milan, Nikola, Simon and Dawn have done a great job building a popular Meetup group and the event participation of 142 people demonstrated as much.
The presenter Julian Pitt was no stranger to running workshops. Until recently he worked for “A Cloud Guru” who provide technical training material online. I personally used their AWS Solution Architect training course to prepare for my exam which I passed the first time round.
Julian’s workshop was titled “Serverless blog page with Gatsby and Appsync” and based on his GitHub repository “Serverless Gatsby Workshop”.
The repository has step by step instructions for setting up a serverless blog and we successfully completed the workshop in the meetup.
Recently I have started experimenting with using the browser based IDE Cloud9 on AWS as my primary IDE. The biggest benefit of this is that I can pick up from where I left off on any computer. This is a huge benefit for me as I have a number of machines with various operating systems that I use and I never know which machine I’m on when I finally have time to code.
In the past I have spent lots of time making sure I have all the dependencies installed on each machine and tried to make sure I always push my code commits when the leave the computer. However, sometimes getting the systems synced will take so long that by the time I’m ready to code I have ran out of time. With AWS Cloud9 all my setup is present no matter where I open my IDE from. I just start coding.
Cloud9 is an EC2 host with an IDE. That means you can do anything you normally do on a Linux server on the machine, including running docker containers or Apache/Nginx web servers. However, interfacing those services with your IDE and previewing or debugging your work can take some configuration.
Those of us who used Cloud9 in the workshop did find that the normal way of previewing the blog site would not work as the server would not respond to a request from a browser. This was a nice little challenge for a team of highly skilled technicians. In the end we found that the solution was to change the port used by the dev instance to 8080. For some reason the server would not respond to requests on the default port 8000.
To preview the blog add TCP port 8080 to your Security Group configuration that the Cloud9 EC2 instance and site start the gatsby site with the following:
gatsby develop --port 8080
If you are interested in AWS services and live in Melbourne the AWS Programming Tools Melbourne is a great forum to catch up with other AWS enthusiasts. The workshop format makes the meetups very practical in its focus and you walk away with new hands on knowledge every time.
5 stars!
