Amazon Cognito Need Something Explained

Question

I am looking at the AWS Amplify and AWS Cognito documentation, and I need something explained. Take the following code:

Auth.signIn({
    username, // Required, the username
    password, // Optional, the password
    validationData, // Optional, a random key-value pair map which can contain any key and will be passed to your PreAuthentication Lambda trigger as-is. It can be used to implement additional validations around authentication
}).then(user => console.log(user))
.catch(err => console.log(err));

Here is some more code from the documentation:

Auth.signUp({
    username,
    password,
    attributes: {
        email,          // optional
        phone_number,   // optional - E.164 number convention
        // other custom attributes 
    },
    validationData: []  //optional
    })
    .then(data => console.log(data))
    .catch(err => console.log(err));

My question is, where do the tokens get stored? Do you store them in state? If so, how do they get refreshed when they do. Or does Auth take care of this and you can just call auth when you need to. If so, do you have to wrap your entire ap with withAuthenticator? I don't understand this. Thanks!

Also, if you want a secure endpoint with AppSync, how does this work? Does it automatically check auth? You're not sending a token so I don't understand how this works. Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

If you're using Amplify it will keep the controls inside the LocalStorage. This will be managed by the Amplify Library. It is also responsible to request a new token when the first one is expired. Again: You don't need to worry about this, the library will manage this for you.

The thing is: you also must use Amplify to send your request o AppSync. When you use Amplify the library will see that you are making a request to a AWS Resource and you're logged in in Cognito and it will append the needed HTTP headers to the request before send it. All this will be done for you by the Amplify library. You can just use it..