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Deploy your application to AWS - AWS Blocks
Setting up AWS credentialsDeploy to a sandboxFull deploymentNext steps

Deploy your application to AWS

After developing and testing your application locally, you can deploy it to AWS. This page covers the one-time AWS account setup and the deployment commands.

Setting up AWS credentials

If you already have AWS credentials configured, skip to Bootstrap the AWS CDK.

Sign up for an AWS account

If you don’t already have an AWS account, complete the following steps to create one.

  1. Open https://portal.aws.amazon.com/billing/signup.

  2. Follow the online instructions.

    Part of the sign-up procedure involves receiving a phone call and entering a verification code on the phone keypad.

    When you sign up for an AWS account, an AWS account root user is created. The root user has access to all AWS services and resources in the account. As a security best practice, assign administrative access to a user, and use only the root user to perform tasks that require root user access.

Create a user with administrative access

  1. Sign in to the IAM console as the account owner by choosing Root user and entering your AWS account email address. On the next page, enter your password.

  2. Enable IAM Identity Center.

    For more information about enabling IAM Identity Center, see Enabling AWS IAM Identity Center in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

  3. In IAM Identity Center, grant administrative access to a user.

    For more information about using the IAM Identity Center directory as your identity source, see Configure user access with the default IAM Identity Center directory in the AWS IAM Identity Center User Guide.

    Note

    Administrative access is recommended for getting started and local development. For production environments, use a least-privilege IAM policy scoped to only the resources that AWS Blocks creates.

Install and configure the AWS CLI

  1. Install the AWS CLI version 2. For more information about installing the AWS CLI, see Installing the AWS CLI.

  2. Configure the AWS CLI with your credentials. For more information about configuring the AWS CLI, see Configuring the AWS CLI to use IAM Identity Center.

  3. Verify your configuration by running the following command:

    aws sts get-caller-identity

    This command should return your account ID, user ID, and ARN.

Bootstrap the AWS CDK

AWS Blocks uses the AWS CDK to deploy infrastructure. You must bootstrap your AWS account before your first deployment.

Run the following command, replacing ACCOUNT_ID and REGION with your values:

npx cdk bootstrap aws://ACCOUNT_ID/REGION

For example:

npx cdk bootstrap aws://123456789012/us-east-1

You need to bootstrap only one time per account and Region combination.

Deploy to a sandbox

A sandbox is a fast, ephemeral deployment for testing against real AWS services. To deploy your application to a sandbox, run the following command:

npm run sandbox

The sandbox:

  • Deploys in seconds using Lambda hot-swapping

  • Uses real AWS services (DynamoDB, API Gateway, Lambda)

  • Supports rapid iteration without full CloudFormation deployments

  • Gives each developer an isolated environment

The same code that ran locally now runs on AWS. Blocks automatically resolve to their AWS implementations. KVStore becomes a DynamoDB table, AuthBasic provisions user storage, and ApiNamespace creates an API Gateway endpoint backed by a Lambda function.

To remove sandbox resources, run the following command:

npm run sandbox:destroy

Full deployment

For a complete deployment including hosting, run the following command:

npm run deploy

This runs a full CDK deployment, creating a CloudFormation stack with all your resources. Use this for staging, production, or branch deployments.

To remove all deployed resources, run the following command:

npm run destroy

Next steps