pixel-me icon indicating copy to clipboard operation
pixel-me copied to clipboard

Create and collaborate on Pixel Art

Pixel me

This project is based on the wonderful Pixel art in React project by Javier Valencia and AWS Amplify.

With Pixel me, you can create, share, and collaborate on pixel art projects in real-time. You can then export the drawing or animation in either CSS, png, GIF, or spritesheet.

This project is built with GraphQL and the GraphQL Transform library.

There are a few main parts to this back end, but everything starts with the base GraphQL schema:

type Drawing @model
@auth(rules: [{allow: public, operations: [create, read, update]}])
@key(name: "byItemType", fields: ["itemType", "createdAt"], queryField: "itemsByType") {
  id: ID!
  clientId: ID!
  name: String!
  data: String
  public: Boolean
  itemType: String
  createdAt: String
  locked: Boolean
}

type Subscription {
  onUpdateByID(id: ID!): Drawing
    @aws_subscribe(mutations: ["updateDrawing"])
}

You can see there are a couple of things going on her here with directives and a custom subscription:

  • The @model directive will build out the DynamoDB table for the drawings
  • The @auth directive allows the creation and editing of types, but restricts the deletion of them
  • The @key directive gives us an easy way to run DynamoDB queries on the itemType field. This makes it easy to set custom access patterns on the itemType field. For instance, in the main view, we only query for Public drawings, but could also set this to anything that we'd like for additional data access patterns.
  • The custom subscription of onUpdateByID allows us to create a subscription for individual drawings by id

Deploy this app in your account

Using the Amplify CLI

  1. Clone the project and install the dependencies
$ git clone https://github.com/dabit3/pixel-me.git
$ cd pixel-me
$ npm install
  1. Initialize the Amplify app
$ amplify init
  1. Deploy the back end
$ amplify push
  1. Test locally
$ npm start

To run a build, run the build command

$ npm run build

Using the Amplify Console

amplifybutton