The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Your React Native App with Expo and AWS Amplify

Published in

TRY Creative Tech

5 min readJan 4, 2023

Are you looking to take your React Native app to the next level and scale it to reach a larger audience? Look no further because this article will show you how to easily scale your React Native app using Expo and AWS Amplify.

But first, let’s quickly go over what Expo and AWS Amplify are.

What is Expo?

Expo is an open-source platform for building native iOS and Android apps using Javascript and React. It comes with a robust set of tools, such as a comprehensive SDK and a command-line interface, that makes it easy for developers to build and iterate on their apps.

What is AWS Amplify?

AWS Amplify is a fully managed platform that makes it easy to build, deploy, and scale mobile and web applications. It offers a variety of features, such as automatic scaling and continuous deployment, that make it a popular choice for building and deploying cloud-powered apps.

Now that we have a basic understanding of Expo and AWS Amplify let’s start with the scaling process.

Step 1: Set up an AWS account

The first step is to set up an AWS account. If you don’t already have an AWS account, you can sign up for one here.

Step 2: Install the AWS Amplify CLI

Next, we’ll install the AWS Amplify command-line interface (CLI) on our local machine. This will allow us to interact easily with the AWS Amplify service from the terminal. To do this, follow these steps:

Open up your terminal and run the following command npm install -g @aws-amplify/cli
Run amplify configure to configure the AWS Amplify CLI
Follow the prompts to sign in with your AWS account and create a new IAM user.

Step 3: Initialize a new AWS Amplify project

Now that we have the AWS Amplify CLI set up, we can initialize a new AWS Amplify project. To do this, follow these steps:

Navigate to the root folder of your React Native project in your terminal.
Run amplify init to initialize a new AWS Amplify project.
Follow the prompts to set up your AWS Amplify project.

Step 4: Add cloud-powered features to your app

With our AWS Amplify project set up, we can now add cloud-powered features to our app. There are various features available, such as authentication, storage, and analytics, but we’ll add a simple GraphQL API for this example. But before the steps, what is GraphQL?

GraphQL is a query language for your API. It was developed by Facebook and is often used as an alternative to REST APIs.

One of the main benefits of GraphQL is that it allows clients to request specific data from an API rather than getting a fixed set of data from a predetermined endpoint. With GraphQL, clients can specify precisely what data they need in a single request, and the server will return only that data. This makes it easier for clients to get the data they need and allows more efficient use of server resources.

Another benefit of GraphQL is that it has a robust type system, which allows developers to define the data types and relationships in their APIs. This helps ensure that data is returned in a predictable format, making it easier to build and maintain client applications.

Now the steps on how to add it to our Expo React-Native application:

Run amplify add apito add a GraphQL API to your AWS Amplify project.

2. Select “GraphQL” as the type of API you want to create.

3. Select “Create a new GraphQL API” when prompted.

4. Choose “Amazon Cognito User Pool” as the authentication type.

5. Give your API a name and click “Create”.

6. Follow the prompts to configure your GraphQL API.

With our GraphQL API set up, we can now use it to add cloud-powered features to our app. For example, we can use it to store and retrieve data from the cloud, authenticate users, and track analytics.

To use the GraphQL API in our app, we’ll need to install the aws-amplify and aws-amplify-react-native packages. To do this, run the following commands in your terminal:

npm install aws-amplify
npm install aws-amplify-react-native

Once these packages are installed, we can use them to interact with our GraphQL API in our React Native app. Here’s an example of how to use the API module to query data from our GraphQL API:

import { API } from 'aws-amplify';

async function getData() {
  try {
    const response = await API.graphql({
      query: `query {
        getData {
          id
          name
          value
        }
      }`,
    });
    console.log(response.data.getData);
  } catch (err) {
    console.log(err);
  }
}

With this code, we can query the getData field of our GraphQL API and retrieve a list of data objects with id, name, and value fields. You can find more information on using the API module and other AWS Amplify features in the official documentation.

Step 5: Deploy your app to AWS

With our GraphQL API set up, we can deploy our app to AWS. To do this, follow these steps:

Run amplify push to build and deploy your app to AWS
Wait for the deployment to complete. This may take a few minutes.

Step 6: Test your app

Now that our app is deployed to AWS, we can test it to ensure everything is working as expected. To do this, follow these steps:

Open up your Expo app on your mobile device.
Scan the QR code that appears in your terminal to open your app in Expo.
Test out your app's features to ensure everything is working as expected.

Conclusion

In this article, we showed you how to easily scale your React Native app using Expo and AWS Amplify. With this method, you can take advantage of the power of the cloud to build and deploy high-performance apps that can reach a larger audience. We hope this tutorial was helpful and that you can start building and scaling your React Native apps with Expo and AWS Amplify.