Host Jekyll Site in AWS S3

In previous post, I’ve wrote about on how to push a Jekyll site to Heroku. In this post it will be about how I host this blog in AWS S3 bucket.

Turns out it is much simpler to do it in S3.

Create a S3 bucket

Create a S3 bucket and enable Web Hosting in the properties.

Configure Github Action

You will need to configure following secrets in your Github setting.

1. AWS_S3_BUCKET with your bucket name.
2. AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID with your AWS access key id.
3. AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY with your AWS secret access id.

name: Sync to S3

on:
push:
branches:
    - master

        jobs:
        deploy:
        runs-on: ubuntu-latest
        steps:
    - uses: actions/checkout@v1

    - name: Retrieve Gem Bundles Cache
        uses: actions/cache@v2
        with:
        path: _bundle
        key: ${{ runner.os }}-gems-${{ hashFiles('**/Gemfile.lock') }}
        restore-keys: |
        ${{ runner.os }}-gems-

    - name: Generate site
        run: |
        mkdir -p _bundle/cache
        chmod a+rwx -R .
        docker-compose run -e JEKYLL_ENV=production jekyll bundle install
        docker-compose run -e JEKYLL_ENV=production jekyll bundle exec jekyll build --trace

    - uses: jakejarvis/s3-sync-action@master
        with:
        args: --acl public-read --follow-symlinks --delete
        env:
        AWS_S3_BUCKET: ${{ secrets.AWS_S3_BUCKET }}
        AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
        AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}
        AWS_REGION: 'ap-southeast-1'
        SOURCE_DIR: '_site'

With a push to master branch, it will trigger a build which will

1. Checkout code from master branch.
2. Generate Jekyll static files.
3. Push generated files inside _site folder to your S3 bucket.

Conclusion

This seems like a cheaper option for hosting a static site and have SSL configured in CloudFront compared to paying for a dyno in Heroku to host a site with SSL. For Heroku, I will need to pay atleast $7/month for a dyno and for CloudFront it will based on usage. Since my blog does not have much visitors, my AWS bill is very small which is around $1/month. This includes S3, Route 53 and CloudFront services.