🚨 Prevent losing production data by enabling the retain deletion policy for your AWS Amplify API!

graphql-retain-transformer

What problem does it solve?

The GraphQL Retain transformer is a custom directive that you can install and use in your AWS Amplify API schema. It will then set the DeletionPolicy of the created DynamoDB tables from the default Delete to Retain.

What this does is it will make sure that those resources and its contents are not getting removed during a stack deletion. The deletion process will run through successfully, but you can still find the old DynamoDB table in your AWS admin console.

Attention: If you create a new DynamoDB table with the exact same name, it will then overwrite the retained table and its data! So creating backups are still a good thing to do from time to time 😉

Read this blog post about this directive for more information: https://react-freelancer.ch/blog/amplify-retain-dynamodb-tables

Installation

npm install --save graphql-retain-transformer

For projects using the old GraphQL Transformer v1 run:

npm install --save graphql-retain-transformer@1

How to use

Setup custom transformer

Edit amplify/backend/api/<YOUR_API>/transform.conf.json and append "graphql-retain-transformer" to the transformers field.

"transformers": [
    "graphql-retain-transformer"
]

Use @retain directive

Append @retain to target types.

type Todo @model @retain {
  id: ID!
  title: String!
  description: String
}

How does it work behind the scenes?

This custom directive just sets the DeletionPolicy of the created DynamoDB tables from the default Delete to Retain.

Read more about the DeletionPolicy in the AWS docs: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/aws-attribute-deletionpolicy.html

Contribute 🦸

Contributions are more than welcome! I love how AWS Amplify helps us developers building great apps in a short time. That's why I'd like to give back with contributions like this. If you feel the same and would like to join me in this project it would be awesome to get in touch! 😊

Please feel free to create, comment and of course solve some of the issues. To get started you can also go for the easier issues marked with the good first issue label if you like.

Development

Clone this repository and open it in your code editor.
Run npm link in the cloned project directory and npm link graphql-retain-transformer in your test project where you want to use it. Maybe you'll have to uninstall the previously installed dependency as installed from NPM repository.
Run npm start in your cloned project directory. Every code change is now immediately used in your test project, so you can just modify code and test it using amplify codegen models or amplify push.

Hint: It is important to always make sure the version of the installed graphql dependency matches the graphql version the graphql-transformer-core depends on.

Publish new NPM package version

Make sure version number is updated.
Run npm publish.
Create new release in GitHub including a tag.

License

The MIT License

Credits

The graphql-retain-transformer library is maintained and sponsored by the Swiss web and mobile app development company Florian Gyger Software.

If this library saved you some time and money please consider sponsoring me, so I can build more libraries for free and actively maintain them for you. Thank you 🙏

flogy/graphql-retain-transformer