Steps to launch Parse using EC2.
1. In EC2 dashboard, click "Launch Instance"
2. Click AWS Marketplace and then search for "Parse", and choose "Parse Server Powered by Bitnami"
3. Select t2.micaro(free tier eligible) and then click "Review and Launch"
4. When launching an instance, we can create a new key pair or choose an existing key pair. The new key pair created will of .pem type and will allow us to use ssh to access the instance later.
At the time of writing, the parse instance is of version 1.0.18. We need to ssh into the instance to find out the appId and masterKey. Below is the steps to do that.
1. In EC2 dashboard, click "Instances" to show the running instances. And select the instance to connect, then click "Connect" button. A window will be shown on how to connect to the instance via ssh.
2. We can use terminal program in MacOS to ssh into the instance. Below is an example.
ssh -i "app.pem" ubuntu@ec2-xx-xxx-xxx-xxx.us-west-2.compute.amazonaws.com
Here app.pem is the keypair file created/chosen at the stage of launching Parse.
3. After logged into the instance, go to directory of ~/app/parse/htdocs and open the file of server.js. The file contains the appId and masterKey for us to be used by an application (for example, iOS app that run on Apple devices) to connect to the server.
Ref[3,4] are two good example sources to use Parse that can be a starting point for us. Ref[4] could be changed from Ref[3] with some adjustments. Still both source codes needs to be adjusted for the Xcode 8.2.1 at the time of writing.
References
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1. https://parseplatform.github.io/docs/ios/guide/
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkGLnXigMD8
3. https://github.com/ParsePlatform/Parse-SDK-iOS-OSX/releases/download/1.14.2/ParseStarterProject-iOS.zip
4. iosdevelopercourse.com/coursecontent10/parseproject.zip
5. https://www.andrewcbancroft.com/2016/05/19/parse-pfcloud-json-text-did-not-start-with-array-or-object/