Use the Amplify Console with incoming webhooks to trigger deployments

Written by Nikhil Swaminathan, Sr. Product Manager (Tech) at AWS.

The Amplify Console recently launched support for incoming webhooks. This feature enables you to use third-party applications such as Contentful and Zapier to trigger deployments in the Amplify Console without requiring a code commit.

You can use headless CMS tools such as Contentful with the Amplify Console incoming webhook feature to trigger a deployment every time content is updated—for example, when a blog author publishes a new post. Modern CMSs are headless in nature, which gives developers the freedom to develop with any technology because the content itself doesn’t have a presentation layer. Content creators get the added benefit of publishing a single instance of the content to both web and mobile devices.

In this blog post, we set up Amplify Console to deploy updates every time new content is published.

1. Create a Contentful account using the Contentful CLI, and follow the steps in the getting started guide. The CLI helps you create a Contentful account, a Contentful project (called a space) with a sample blog content model, and a starter repository that’s downloaded to your local machine.

2. After the CLI creates a Contentful space, log in to your Contentful space at the Contentful website and choose ‘Settings > API Keys’.

3. The API keys were generated when you ran the CLI. Copy the Space ID and Content Delivery API. You’ll need these to trigger content deployments.

4. Push the code to a Git repo of your choice (Amplify Console supports GitHub, BitBucket, GitLab, and CodeCommit).

Log in to the Amplify Console, connect your repo, and pick a branch. On the Build Settings page, enter the CONTENTFUL_DELIVERY_TOKEN and the CONTENTFUL_SPACE_ID into the environment variables section. These tokens are used by your app during the build to authenticate with the Contentful service. Review the changes, and choose Save and deploy. Your app builds and deploys to an amplifyapp.com URL. It should look like this:

5. Create an incoming webhook to publish content updates. Choose App Settings > Build Settings, and then choose Create webhook. This webhook enables you to trigger a build in the Amplify Console on every POST to the HTTP endpoint. After you create the webhook, copy the URL (it looks like  https://webhooks.amplify…)

6. Go back to the Contentful dashboard, and choose Settings > Webhooks. Then choose  Add Webhook. Paste the webhook URL you copied from the Amplify Console into the URL section and update the Content Type to application/json. Choose Save.

7. We’re now ready to trigger a new build through a content update! Go to the Content tab on Contentful and add a new entry with the following fields—Name: Deploying to Amplify Console and Content Type: Blog Post. Enter the other required fields, and choose Publish.

8. The Amplify Console will kickoff a new build with the newest post.

You can also use the incoming webhook feature to trigger builds on post-commit Git hooks, and through daily build schedulers. We hope you like this new feature – learn more about the Amplify Console at https://console.amplify.aws.