A few weeks ago, I made a post about moving my site into S3 and a few things unexpected issues that I ran into. What I didn't mention was my migration to Nikola from WordPress and then my actual deployment into S3. I've outlined most of the deployment steps I went through. A basic understanding of AWS services (specifically S3 and CloudFront) is assumed, but I try to be as helpful as I can.

S3 Setup

This is fairly well documented in the S3 documentation, but to host a website you first need to create a bucket with the name of the hostname you want to use. For me, I have two buckets: whatan00b.com and www.whatan00b.com (more on the two buckets later). Once the buckets are created, you'll want to enable website hosting on them. In the S3 interface, if you click on Properties for the bucket, expand the "Static Website Hosting" bit. Check the box for "Enable website hosting". The default document root of index.html is perfectly fine. Error Document is something you'll likely want to come back to later.

If you created two buckets like I did, you'll want to do that step only on the primary bucket you want to host the website through. For the other bucket (for me, whatan00b.com), instead check the radio button for "Redirect requests to another host name". You'll want to fill out the hostname you used in the other bucket to redirect requests and save it.

"Pretty URLs"

This is somewhat related to the migration from WordPress, but I really didn't want to have URLs that pointed directly to the static HTML file, I wanted to hit the directory index to view pages. This was mainly to avoid adding redirects in S3. This is easily doable, I just like the cleaner look of URLs. If you left index.html as the document root as index.html in the S3 setup step, things should be fine on the S3 side.

On the Nikola side, I used the PRETTY_URLS option and set it to True in config.py. At the time of this writing, I had to install Nikola from the master branch on Github to make this work (see example) . It appears this feature will be released in 5.4.5. Enabling this option creates a directory for each blog post, with an index.html inside. Note that S3 will redirect and add a trailing slash if the user does not add one themselves (this was fine for me).

Deploying the files!

I have been using Fabric for other projects as of late, so I actually skipped the deployment bit altogether inside of Nikola. The deployment piece inside of Nikola currently only allows users to specify a list of commands that make up their deployment anyway (I assume this is generally an rsync to a list of servers or something along those lines for most folks). This is probably easily extendable, but I'm already in the habit of doing a 'fab deploy' when I am ready to push out code anyway, so I chose to stick with Fabric and ignore the Nikola deployment bit altogether for now. You could easily write the same type of function and add a "fab deploy" to the deployment section of your Nikola config file. You can view my deployment script over on Bitbucket (and the whole site for that matter!). It's probably not the most efficient file sync function ever written, but it's mine and it works for me.

If you don't want to go through all of this, there are lots of FTP / SFTP / whatever clients out there that support S3. You can also easily use something like Cyberduck on a Mac or Windows to push the files to your bucket.

CloudFront Setup

The CloudFront setup was one that bit me. This is something that I mentioned in my previous post, but I'll reiterate it again. For this setup, don't set CloudFront to use the S3 bucket as its source. Set the origin to be a "Custom Origin", using the S3 bucket website hosting endpoint as the URL. This can be found in the bucket properties section you looked at in the S3 setup section. If you don't do this, the site index will work, but lower directory indexes won't work.

Once the distribution is created and origins set, you should be able to hit the origin URL given in the AWS console. Once you are happy with the way things look, you can add an alias on the CloudFront distribution with the hostname you want to use for your site. After that's complete, you're just a CNAME away from the site being hosted on CloudFront. I happen to use Route53 as my DNS provider, so I just added an alias for the CloudFront distribution and things work nicely.