Ionic AWS Starter

This Ionic starter comes with a pre-configured AWS Mobile Hub project set up to use Amazon DynamoDB, S3, Pinpoint, and Cognito.

Using the Starter

Installing Ionic CLI 3.0

This starter project requires Ionic CLI 3.0, to install, run

npm install -g ionic@latest

Make sure to add sudo on Mac and Linux. If you encounter issues installing the Ionic 3 CLI, uninstall the old one using npm uninstall -g ionic first.

Installing AWS CLI

To install the AWS CLI, first ensure your pip installation is up to date:

pip install --upgrade pip

Next, install the AWS CLI:

pip install awscli

Note: add sudo to the above commands on Mac and Linux.

Creating the Ionic Project

To create a new Ionic project using this AWS Mobile Hub starter, run

ionic start myApp aws

Which will create a new app in ./myApp.

Once the app is created, cd into it:

cd myApp

Proceed to the next steps on importing the auto-generated AWS Mobile Hub project.

Creating AWS Mobile Hub Project

Visit the AWS Mobile Hub and enter the Mobile Hub Console.

In the Mobile Hub dashboard, click the "Import your project" button. Next, find the mobile-hub-project.zip included in this starter project, and drag and drop it to the import modal. Set the name of the project, and then click "Import project."

Once the project is imported, you'll be directed to the dashboard for this Mobile Hub project. To continue configuring the app, you'll need to find the name of the Amazon S3 bucket auto generated through the App Content Delivery system. To do this, click the "Resources" button on the left side of the Mobile Hub project dashboard, find the "Amazon S3 Buckets" card, and then copy the bucket name that contains hosting-mobilehub.

Next, assuming your terminal is still open inside of the myApp folder, run:

aws s3 cp s3://BUCKET_NAME/aws-config.js src/assets

Replacing BUCKET_NAME with the full name of the S3 bucket found above. This will copy the auto-generated aws-config.js file into the src/assets folder in your Ionic app, which pre-configures all your AWS settings automatically.

Enabling file uploads

The Account page has an example of taking a photo or uploading a file to the userfiles S3 bucket. To enable uploads from the web, make sure to edit the CORS Policy for the S3 bucket by opening the bucket with userfiles in it from the Resources tab in the Mobile Hub.

A working, albeit liberal CORS configuration looks like

<!-- Sample policy -->
<CORSConfiguration>
	<CORSRule>
		<AllowedOrigin>*</AllowedOrigin>
		<AllowedMethod>GET</AllowedMethod>
		<AllowedMethod>POST</AllowedMethod>
		<AllowedMethod>PUT</AllowedMethod>
		<AllowedHeader>*</AllowedHeader>
	</CORSRule>
</CORSConfiguration>

Running the app

Now the app is configured and wired up to the AWS Mobile Hub and AWS services. To run the app in the browser, run

ionic serve

To run the app on device, first add a platform, and then run it:

ionic cordova platform add ios
ionic cordova run ios

Or open the platform-specific project in the relevant IDE:

open platforms/ios/MyApp.xcodeproj

Hosting app on Amazon S3

Since your Ionic app is just a web app, it can be hosted as a static website in an Amazon S3 bucket. To do this, copy the web assets to the S3 bucket:

npm run build
aws s3 cp --recursive ./www s3://WEBSITE_BUCKET

Where WEBSITE_BUCKET is an S3 bucket configured with static hosting.