Basic CRUD operations with AWS DynamoDB and Node.js

August 20, 2019

Amazon’s DynamoDB is a unique and fairly popular NoSQL database solution, especially for more enterprise/professional/serverless undertakings. I personally know I’ll be using it at my job some time soon, so I figured I’d learn the basics and whip up a quick tutorial to solidify my learning and save future readers some time and mental energy.

Because I’ve been working a lot with movie data building a game where you predict Rotten Tomatoes scores against your coworkers in Slack, we’ll do the same in this tutorial.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to do the following.

Setup the AWS-SDK in a super basic Node.js project
Create a “Movies” table
Create Fast & Furious movies as items in the table
List all of the movies in the table
Edit a movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score
Delete a movie
Optional: Be motivated to watch a movie with insane car stunts and egregiously indestructible characters.

Quick note…

The syntax for DynamoDB and parameters for various methods used in this tutorial are odd in my opinion, and I don’t want to muddy the waters by trying to explain them. The goal of this tutorial is just to get your feed wet with actual items in a table. You can and should use Google and the AWS docs when seeing these things for the first time.

Before getting into the code…

You’ll need to make an AWS account, if you don’t have one already.

Check out the Getting Started guide, which will show you how to create an account, create an IAM user and setup the AWS CLI.

Once you’re done with the CLI step, confirm that your aws config file is all good by running the following command.

cat  ~/.aws/credentials

You should see your aws_access_key_id and aws_secret_access_key printed out in the terminal.

Setup the project

Create a directory called dynamo-tutorial and initialize a new Node project.

mkdir dynamo-tutorial
cd dynamo-tutorial
npm init -y

Install the AWS-SDK, which we’ll use to do stuff with DynamoDB.

npm install aws-sdk

Create a new app.js file and add the following code to it. Here we’re just setting things up to be able to use DynamoDB methods from the SDK. This stuff won’t change, so I won’t include in future snippets.

const AWS = require("aws-sdk");

AWS.config.update({
  region: "us-east-1", // replace with your region in AWS account
});

const DynamoDB = new AWS.DynamoDB();

Create a DynamoDB table to store movies

First, add a createTable function and export it.

We’ll need to export every function to actually execute them via the command line, so do the same for all future functions!

function createTable() {
  const params = {
    TableName: "Movies",
    KeySchema: [{ AttributeName: "title", KeyType: "HASH" }],
    AttributeDefinitions: [{ AttributeName: "title", AttributeType: "S" }],
    ProvisionedThroughput: {
      ReadCapacityUnits: 10,
      WriteCapacityUnits: 10,
    },
  };

  DynamoDB.createTable(params, function(err, data) {
    if (err) {
      console.error("Unable to create table", err);
    } else {
      console.log("Created table", data);
    }
  });
}

module.exports = {
  createTable,
};

Execute the function in your terminal to actually create the table

node -e 'require("./app.js").createTable()'

To see that it actually worked, log in to your AWS console, navigate to DynamoDB and click the “Tables” tab on the sidebar. Your “Movies” table should be created, or in the process of being created.

Add all of the Fast & Furious movies to the table

Define a new function addMovie.

function addMovie(title, rtScore) {
  const params = {
    TableName: "Movies",
    Item: {
      title: { S: title },
      rtScore: { N: rtScore },
    },
  };

  DynamoDB.putItem(params, function(err) {
    if (err) {
      console.error("Unable to add movie", err);
    } else {
      console.log(`Added ${title} with a Rotten Tomatoes Score of ${rtScore}%`);
    }
  });
}

To see that this function actually adds an item to the table, let’s add the movie that started it all.

node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("The Fast and the Furious", "100")'

Go to your AWS console and confirm that the legendary car racing thriller was added to the table.

Now that we can add movies, let’s populate our Movies table with the rest of the franchise.

node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("2 Fast 2 Furious", "36")'
node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift", "38")'
node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("Fast & Furious", "29")'
node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("Fast Five", "77")'
node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("Fast & Furious 6", "70")'
node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("Furious 7", "81")'
node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("The Fate of the Furious", "67")'
node -e 'require("./app.js").addMovie("Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw", "67")'

Get all movies in the table

So far, we’ve looked at the movies in our table using the AWS console. Instead, let’s fetch them programmatically and output them to the terminal (Node console).

Create a new function called getAllMovies. (Don’t forget to export it.)

function getAllMovies() {
  const params = {
    TableName: "Movies",
  };

  DynamoDB.scan(params, function(err, data) {
    if (err) {
      console.error("Unable to find movies", err);
    } else {
      console.log(`Found ${data.Count} movies`);
      console.log(data.Items);
    }
  });
}

Execute that function in your terminal and you should see all of the franchise movies we added earlier.

node -e 'require("./app.js").getAllMovies()'

If we want to just get one movie based on the title, we can use a function like getMovie.

function getMovie(title) {
  const params = {
    TableName: "Movies",
    Key: {
      title: { S: title },
    },
  };

  DynamoDB.getItem(params, function(err, data) {
    if (err) {
      console.error("Unable to find movie", err);
    } else {
      console.log("Found movie", data.Item);
    }
  });
}

Edit a movie’s Rotten Tomatoes score

Oops! You probably noticed that I gave the first The Fast and The Furious the score I think it should have gotten, rather than the actual 53%. We need to edit that item in the table.

So let’s make an updateMovieScore function that saves a new score for the given movie title.

function updateMovieScore(title, newRtScore) {
  const params = {
    TableName: "Movies",
    Item: {
      title: { S: title },
      rtScore: { N: newRtScore.toString() },
    },
    ReturnConsumedCapacity: "TOTAL",
  };

  DynamoDB.putItem(params, function(err) {
    if (err) {
      console.error("Unable to find movie", err);
    } else {
      console.log(`Updated ${title} with new RT Score of ${newRtScore}%`);
    }
  });
}

Update the movie.

node -e 'require("./app.js").updateMovieScore("The Fast and the Furious", 53)'

To check that the score updated, verify with the output from our getMovie function.

node -e 'require("./app.js").getMovie("The Fast and the Furious")'

Delete a movie

The “Hobbs & Shaw” movie isn’t truly in the F&F saga - it’s more of a spinoff. To please the F&F puritans, let’s delete that movie from our table.

First, create and export a deleteMove function.

function deleteMovie(title) {
  const params = {
    TableName: "Movies",
    Key: {
      title: { S: title },
    },
  };

  DynamoDB.deleteItem(params, function(err) {
    if (err) {
      console.error("Unable to find movie", err);
    } else {
      console.log(`Deleted ${title}`);
    }
  });
}

Now execute the function to delete the movie, then list out all of the movies to prove that it was actually deleted.

node -e 'require("./app.js").deleteMovie("Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw")'

node -e 'require("./app.js").getAllMovies()'

And that’s it!

Super basic stuff, but it’s a start!

Hi, I'm Ryan. I live in Denver and work remotely as a JavaScript/React/Node Developer. I'm always having fun building side projects and sometimes write JavaScript-related tutorials that help folks build things, too.

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