Automating Deployments of this Site

  • Edited 2022-08-31
  • Edited 2021-06-03

Overview

This website is generated using Hugo, hosted in Amazon Web Services, and automatically deployed every time I push a change to the main branch of the GitHub repository. My goal was to keep the maintenance of this site simple. This post describes how I achieved that goal by configuring the site’s hosting and automated deployments.

The code that I use to create and deploy this site is hosted on GitHub.

Generating Content

Hugo is a static site generator that converts Markdown files to HTML. I used the Hugo theme cactus to give my site a simple and clean aesthetic. I can generate the HTML web content from Markdown using the $hugo --minify command12.

Configuring Infrastructure

I hosted the Hugo-generated web content in Amazon Web Services infrastructure. Specifically, AWS S3 stores my web content, AWS Route 53 manages my domain name lookups, and AWS CloudFront manages HTTPS certificates and content delivery.

To set up my S3 bucket3, I configured it to host a static website, I enabled logging, and I made the bucket publicly accessible. I also created a second bucket that redirects to the first, to handle traffic to both wunused.com and www.wunused.com. Note that S3 hosting only provides support for HTTP traffic — I added HTTPS support with AWS CloudFront.

For DNS resolution, I configured Route 53 to create a Hosted Zone4, and for my Namecheap domain settings5 to use the custom DNS nameservers provided by Route 53 (since my domain name was purchased using Namecheap). This caused Route 53 to become the DNS provider for my domain, so I also needed to configure other services that use the domain, like mail, in Route 53 rather than in Namecheap.

To configure secure connections to my site with HTTPS, I created and configured SSL/TLS certificates in CloudFront678.

For permissions management, I used AWS IAM to create a new user with only enough permissions necessary to deploy my web content to AWS — specifically, to push content to my S3 bucket, and to invalidate the CloudFront cache9. This ensures that if my AWS secret tokens are ever compromised, the actions that they allow are only the ones necessary for deploying the site, and nothing more.

Automating Deployments

To automatically deploy my content into my AWS infrastructure, I created a GitHub Actions workflow to build my web content in one job and to deploy the content to my AWS infrastructure in another. I used GitHub Secrets to keep my sensitive AWS secret tokens out of my publicly accessible configuration file, and I used artifacts to pass information between the two jobs. The workflow triggers only on push actions to main.

Cost

So far, the cost of hosting and deploying my site is entirely within AWS and GitHub Actions free tiers, except for a $0.50 monthly cost for using AWS Route 53 services. I also pay annually to register my domain on Namecheap, on the order of about $15 per year.

  1. https://gohugo.io/getting-started/configuration/#configuration-file ↩︎

  2. https://github.com/monkeyWzr/hugo-theme-cactus/blob/master/README.md ↩︎

  3. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/userguide/website-hosting-custom-domain-walkthrough.html ↩︎

  4. https://benjamincongdon.me/blog/2017/06/13/How-to-Deploy-a-Secure-Static-Site-to-AWS-with-S3-and-CloudFront/#step-4-configure-route53-to-route-traffic-from-our-custom-domain ↩︎

  5. https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/10371/2208/how-do-i-link-my-domain-to-amazon-web-services/ ↩︎

  6. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/cloudfront-https-requests-s3/ ↩︎

  7. https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/install-ssl-cloudfront/ ↩︎

  8. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/routing-to-cloudfront-distribution.html#routing-to-cloudfront-distribution-config ↩︎

  9. https://capgemini.github.io/development/Using-GitHub-Actions-and-Hugo-Deploy-to-Deploy-to-AWS/ ↩︎