Contradictory Information - amplifyconfiguration.json about docs

[josefaidt]

Hey @robinmalburn 👋 thanks for raising this! The primary reason this file is gitignored is due to it holding references to resources for a specific environment. If you are in a situation where you have a private repo and one branch/env, committing this file is fine -- after all it will be used in your frontend application and surfaced to the client.

In Amplify (Gen 1) this file is created on amplify init, pull, env checkout, and push. Maybe a few others, but those are the primary commands you'd interact with that will create/update this file.

This file is somewhat similar to dotenv files where you may have a set of required env vars for your application to work, but they are often tied to the environment and change across environments.

[robinmalburn]

Hi @josefaidt, many thanks for the quick response.

Treating the file like a dotenv equivalent makes a lot of sesne, especially in a multi-dev / multi-env environment. With that in mind, recommending it goes in .gitignore makes total sense.

I think the missing piece of the puzzle, for me at least, is that during builds, it seems like Amplify can automatically run an amplify pull (though it says it'll create aws-exports.js, I assume it actually creates an amplifyconfiguration.json instead/as well).

I wonder if there's a way that could be called out more clearly in the docs (or located alongside the place it says the file shouldn't be tracked), just to sign post people to how to best link up the backend deployment side of things. If there's a way of keeping things autogenerated at build time instead of being tracked, in light of the use case conversation, that definitely seems like a good path to nudge people down.

[ilko-masaldzhiyski]

I probably have a lot more ground to cover. Nonetheless, how does one fix this then?
I am hosting this in a private repo and am inclined to just commenting-out everything that Amplify created in .gitignore

[GaNiziolek]

Might be useful https://docs.amplify.aws/gen2/reference/amplifyconfiguration/