Deploy Astro to AWS Amplify: A Step-by-Step Guide

In this guide, you will learn how to deploy an Astro SSR project to AWS Amplify. You will go through the process of setting up a new Astro project, enabling server-side rendering using AWS Amplify adapter, and finally deploying it to AWS Amplify.

Prerequisites
Create a new Astro application
Getting Started with the AWS Amplify Adapter for Astro
Deploy to AWS Amplify
Conclusion

Prerequisites

You’ll need the following:

Node.js 18 or later
An AWS account

Create a new Astro application

Let’s get started by creating a new Astro project. Open your terminal and run the following command:

npm create astro@latest my-app

npm create astro is the recommended way to scaffold an Astro project quickly.

When prompted, choose:

Empty when prompted on how to start the new project.
Yes when prompted if plan to write Typescript.
Strict when prompted how strict Typescript should be.
Yes when prompted to install dependencies.
Yes when prompted to initialize a git repository.

Once that’s done, you can move into the project directory and start the app:

cd my-app
npm run dev

The app should be running on localhost:4321.

Next, in your first terminal window, run the command below to install the necessary libraries and packages for building the application:

npm install dotenv

The libraries installed include:

dotenv: A library for handling environment variables.

Getting Started with the AWS Amplify Adapter for Astro

Before deploying your Astro project, you need to install the astro-aws-amplify adapter. This is easily done via the Astro CLI:

npm install astro-aws-amplify

The libraries installed include:

astro-aws-amplify: An adapter that prepares Astro websites to be deployed on AWS Amplify.

Once the adapter is installed, you’ll need to add it to your astro.config.mjs file. Open the file and add the following code:

import { defineConfig } from 'astro/config';
import awsAmplify from 'astro-aws-amplify'; 

// https://astro.build/config
export default defineConfig({
  output: "server", 
  adapter: awsAmplify(), 
});

The additions do the following:

Imports default export of astro-aws-amplify.
Uses the above import as the adapter of your Astro application.
Sets output to server to enable server-side rendering compatible output.

Then, create a amplify.yml at the root of repository with the following code:

version: 1
frontend:
  phases:
    preBuild:
      commands:
        - npm ci
    build:
      commands:
        - env >> .env
        - npm run build
        - mv node_modules ./.amplify-hosting/compute/default
        - mv .env ./.amplify-hosting/compute/default/.env
  artifacts:
    baseDirectory: .amplify-hosting
    files:
      - '**/*'
  cache:
    paths:
      - node_modules/**/*

The code above does the following:

Uses preBuild commands to install the dependencies of your Astro project.
Uses build commands to:
- Store all the environment variables into .env file at the root of the project.
- Build your Astro application.
- Move the node_modules directory and .env file to Amplify’s compute directory.

Deploy to AWS Amplify

The code is now ready to deploy to AWS Amplify. Use the following steps to deploy:

Start by creating a GitHub repository containing your app’s code.
Then, navigate to the AWS Amplify Dashboard and click on Get Started under Host your web app section.

Select GitHub as the source of your Git repository.

Link the new project to the GitHub repository you just created.

Give a name to your project, and click on Advanced Settings.

In Advanced Settings, update the Environment Variables to match those in your local .env file, and PORT as 3000. Click Next to proceed.

Add Environment Variables in AWS Amplify

Click Save and Deploy to deploy your website.

Grab the deployment URL under the Domain title in the succesful build information.

Conclusion

Yay! You’ve now an Astro project that automatically deploys to AWS Amplify upon Git push.