Sandbox features

Sandbox environments include additional features for managing secrets, deploying multiple sandboxes, config generation, and client codegen for your Amplify app.

Secure secrets in your sandbox

Amplify Gen 2 offers secure secret storage to manage sensitive data like API keys and database credentials. Secrets are similar to environment variables, but they are encrypted AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store key value pairs. Secrets are stored in AWS Parameter Store under the /amplify prefix.

Set secrets

You can add secrets to your sandbox environment using the following command:

npx ampx sandbox secret set foo
? Enter secret value: ###
Done!

npx ampx sandbox secret set bar
? Enter secret value: ###
Done!

After these commands, your sandbox will have two secrets named foo and bar.

List secrets

You can list all of the secret names available in your sandbox environment with the following command:

npx ampx sandbox secret list
 - foo
 - bar

Retrieve a secret

To show the value of a secret, run the following command.

npx ampx sandbox secret get foo
name: foo
version: 1
value: abc123
lastUpdated: Mon Nov 13 2023 22:19:12 GMT-0800 (Pacific Standard Time)

Remove secrets

To remove a secret from from the sandbox, run the following command in your terminal:

npx ampx sandbox secret remove foo

Reference secrets

Once you have set a secret, you can reference the secret in your backend definition using the secret() function. The following example shows how to set up social sign-in with authentication in your app. Depending on your environment, Amplify will automatically load the correct secret value.

import { defineAuth, secret } from '@aws-amplify/backend';

export const auth = defineAuth({
  loginWith: {
    email: true,
    externalProviders: {
      facebook: {
Copy highlighted code example
        clientId: secret('foo'),
        clientSecret: secret('bar')
      }
    }
  }
});

The secret() function does NOT retrieve the value of the secret. It places a reference to the secret value in the backend definition. The secret value is only resolved during deployment of your backend.

The secret() function can only be used in specific places in your backend definition such as configuring auth providers and function secrets.

Work with multiple AWS profiles

Sometimes you might have multiple AWS profiles set up locally. To run ampx sandbox secret commands, use the --profile flag to deploy to a specific profile. For example, let's say you have two AWS profiles set up locally—default and work. To add secrets to the sandbox in the work profile, run the following command in your terminal:

npx ampx sandbox secret set foo --profile work

Work with multiple named sandboxes

You can create multiple sandboxes if you want to have different features or test environments available in different sandboxes. By default, your sandbox is named based on the local machine username. To override this name, use the --identifier option:

npx ampx sandbox --identifier feature1sandbox

This will start a sandbox named feature1sandbox.

Once the deployment completes, exit sandbox and run the following command in the terminal:

npx ampx sandbox --identifier feature2sandbox

After successful deployment, you will have two sandboxes feature1sandbox and feature2sandbox. You can switch between them but only one can be running at a time.

Secret management with named sandboxes

When working with multiple sandboxes, secrets must be configured for each one. All of the sandbox secret commands accept the --identifier argument to manage secrets for named sandboxes. For example, to add a secret to feature1sandbox, use:

npx ampx sandbox --identifier feature1sandbox secret set baz

Stream function logs

Amplify offers the ability to stream function logs directly to your terminal or a file. Learn more about streaming function logs.

Generate client config

The client config, or amplify_outputs.json file, contains the configuration strings for interacting with AWS resources specific to an environment. The Amplify client libraries need the client config in order to use the library APIs to connect to backend resources. By default, the cloud sandbox generates the client configuration file at the root of the project (such as @/amplify_outputs.json). If you want to place the file at a different path (such as for a monorepo or Android app), run the following command in the terminal:

npx ampx sandbox --outputs-format json-mobile --outputs-out-dir app/src/main/res/raw

Deployment Environment

Alternatively, if you want to generate the config for a branch environment to test against, you can run the following command below in the terminal:

For Web and React Native, generating the config with the default format and output directory.

npx ampx generate outputs --app-id <app-id> --branch main

npx ampx generate outputs --app-id <app-id> --branch main --out-dir app/src/main/res/raw

Generate client codegen

Codegen generates native code for Swift (iOS), Java (Android), and JavaScript that represents your GraphQL API's data models. It can also generate GraphQL statements (queries, mutations, and subscriptions) so that you don't have to manually code them.

Once your sandbox completes a deployment, you can run the following command in the terminal to generate client code that is specific to your needs:

npx ampx generate graphql-client-code
--format [choices: "modelgen", "graphql-codegen", "introspection"]

Delete a sandbox

You can delete a cloud sandbox environment in several ways:

1. Ctrl+C your sandbox and choose to delete resources.
2. Run npx ampx sandbox delete or npx ampx sandbox delete --name
3. Visit the Amplify console and delete sandboxes.