Local Development and Deployment

TL;DR

Webiny is a serverless platform on AWS. Deploy with yarn webiny deploy, develop locally with yarn webiny watch (API uses Local Lambda Development, Admin runs a local React dev server). Projects support multiple environments (long-lived and short-lived). Always redeploy after stopping watch mode.

Deployment

Initial Deployment

Deploy all three applications (Core, API, Admin) at once:

yarn webiny deploy

This deploys to the dev environment by default. First deployment takes 5-15 minutes.

Deploying Individual Applications

yarn webiny deploy core        # Infrastructure only
yarn webiny deploy api         # Backend API only
yarn webiny deploy admin       # Admin frontend only

Deploy to a Specific Environment

yarn webiny deploy --env prod
yarn webiny deploy api --env staging

Get Deployment Info

yarn webiny info              # Shows all URLs (Admin, API, CloudFront)
yarn webiny info --env prod   # Info for a specific environment

Local Development

Before developing locally, you must deploy Core and API first:

yarn webiny deploy core api

Admin Development

yarn webiny watch admin

• Starts a local dev server at http://localhost:3001
• Hot module replacement for instant feedback
• Standard React development experience
• Use for: custom Admin UI extensions, white-label branding, custom views

API Development (Local Lambda Development)

yarn webiny watch api

How it works:

1. Lambda stubs deployed -- real Lambda functions are replaced with stubs that forward events
2. Events forwarded -- requests to AWS get forwarded to your local machine
3. Local execution -- your code runs locally with full AWS Lambda environment
4. Response routing -- responses sent back through the Lambda stub

Benefits: