A Minor Amplify Disaster

So, I've been working on a little app to take in an arbitrary block of Russian text, turn everything back to "dictionary form" within it, de-dupe and create flashcards in Quizlet - grouped by word complexity (as judged by their placement in the overall word frequency list for the Russian language). Basically, I want something that will help me learn the vocabulary I need to watch specific movies or understand specific online texts, etc.

Anyhow, I'm building the whole thing using Ionic and AWS, and there's a great Amazon technology to combine the two now called Amplify. Amplify is this great little CLI that automatically adds AWS features and the client code needed to access them, if you run it from within your Ionic project.

Well, I made a mistake and I wanted to start over, so I - for reasons lost to me - deleted a Lambda API that I'd created via Amplify directly out of the AWS console. This was a bad, bad move! I've spent the last hour trying to figure out how to recover from this, as every subsequent update operation - even trying to update my hosted Ionic in S3 failed, saying - cryptically - that it couldn't find the relevant Lambda function. Obviously, Amplify maintains some metadata locally - but there's no "resync" command available to say "just make your local metadata match whatever you see in the cloud right now."

So, my ultimate solution was to take all my code - already open in Visual Studio Code - and do a global search for the name of my old API. This took me to lots of JSON structures inside the Amplify metadata. Deleting out the JSON nodes that contained those names - not just the specific properties, but the entire surrounding JSON node, set me back to "zero" and is letting me move forward again.

So - there's an approach if you make this mistake. But, the real lesson here is - if you're using Amplify - don't manipulate your stuff directly through the AWS console!