tl;dr: Why can't the Cloud9 IDE find the aws-amplify module, when I followed the official, step-by-step AWS Amplify React tutorial exactly?
Any help to just get me quickly up and running would be greatly appreciated. While the current top priority is solving the module issue, there are, and have been, numerous problems just doing the most basic things
Despite the hype, AWS Amplify does not work as advertised and you definitely can't spin up a project in an hour, at least not if you follow their documentation.
I already lost a full week due to hidden resource limits (for new accounts), which lead to a 5 day back and forth with support. Getting them to both increase the quota so I could continue immediately, while also solving the issue for the hundreds of people affected, seemed to cause a lot of trouble on their end. There are dozens of threads complaining about the issue that AWS support refuses to fix. It took them multiple tries to successfully increase my app quota. Then they ultimately gave me a nasty reply from a developer when I suggested they just set the visible quotas to whatever the hidden value is, thereby eliminating all confusion and fixing the issue for everyone. Perhaps it was that I asked for documentation on the hidden quotas, and for a list of any other secret quotas, that set them off. It really isn't clear.
That said, their support is not a viable path for solving... anything.
I am trying to keep things as simple as possible. I am using Cloud9, with the idea that the environment should be properly configured out of the box. However, that wasn't the case, as weeks ago I ran into a problem just installing React tools (per some AWS-provided guide I was following at the time) and it failed on a free-tier EC2 server due to lack of memory, so I had to move over to a larger instance (no longer free), just to get started.
Anyway... I am currently following this official tutorial Set up fullstack project and I did the npm install aws-amplify step, seemingly successfully. When I then edit the src/main.tsx as indicated, a number of errors pop up. I could resolve a few of them easily, but it's not clear why it can't find the aws-amplify module (it's there).
- I tried
npm audit fix --force, as suggested in another thread on here. - I have removed node_modules and reinstalled.
- I have removed the entire project and started over.
I'm sick of fighting with the most basic things. I just want to get to a point where I can actually do something useful. It really shouldn't be this difficult.
Some other issues I have encountered...
In the same page of the tutorial, it suggests you run npm run dev and then view the server somehow. But, on Cloud9, it is unable to view the http server (ie. http://localhost:5173). I could access it via curl. The only ways I think I could view it would be to enable HTTPS support, expose the port on the EC2 instance so I could access it from a local machine, or run a separate browser instance inside the EC2 instance with an exported display for the session. That's all overly complicated for what should be a turnkey development environment. I don't want to waste time on this, but I am concerned it might become a problem down the road if I really do need to load things in a browser from a local server.
In those few initial scripts I ran, as directed by the tutorial (ie. amplify configure), I get numerous errors about xdg-utils, which I guess is due to it trying to bring up browser windows from within the Cloud9 environment. I don't really want to get into setting that up, but perhaps I am missing things by sticking to the command line for those steps.
This is just on the second page of the tutorial. At this rate, it will never get finished. Not one thing has worked as described.