Serving the Site over HTTPS with CloudFront

Sat, 19 Nov 2022 20:02:08 -0600

In the previous post I built the site. But a few improvements were needed:

The website should use https instead of http.
The S3 bucket should not allow public access.

So CloudFront is the way to go.

I followed this AWS guide, using a REST API endpoint as the origin with access restricted by an origin access control (OAC). These were the steps:

Apply for two SSL certificates from ACM — one for album69.com and one for *.album69.com.
Create two CloudFront distributions — one for album69.com and one for www.album69.com. I chose OAC instead of OAI, which is the legacy setting.
Set the alternate domain names — album69.com and www.album69.com, each with its corresponding SSL certificate.
Update DNS in Route 53 — point the A records to the CloudFront distributions.

Automation

The infrastructure itself — S3 buckets, CloudFront distributions, Route 53 records — was built with Terraform (that’s another article). For day-to-day publishing, deploy.sh handles the build, sync, and CloudFront invalidation in one command.

Building This Site with Hugo and S3

Sun, 13 Nov 2022 08:02:08 -0600

I’m not a web developer, but I wanted a website — a place to showcase my work and prove to myself I could build one. So I spent the Remembrance Day long weekend rebuilding my site from scratch.

I chose Hugo because it’s a fast, modern static site generator, and AWS S3 for hosting.

Installation

I work on a Windows 10 machine with WSL2 Ubuntu. I installed the extended edition of Hugo via Homebrew — sudo apt install hugo doesn’t ship the latest release.

Tech on Album69

Serving the Site over HTTPS with CloudFront

Automation

Building This Site with Hugo and S3

Installation