Jekyll AWS S3

This project is a template to setup a website built using Jekyll, an open-source static website generator Ruby-based framework.

Jekyll provides both the functionality to generate the required HTML, CSS & JavaScript files as well as a local web server for development purposes.

This template is designed for hosting on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 Bucket with Static Web Hosting; providing a low cost & high performance solution to static web hosting.

CI/CD has been implemented to provide automatic code compilations to be deployed to the aforementioned AWS infrastructure.

Website

Getting Started

These instructions will get you a copy of the project up and running on your local machine for development and testing purposes.

See Infrastructure & Deployment sections for instructions on how to deploy the website on a live system.

Pre-Requisites

Maintaining this codebase will require the following software installed on your local machine:

• Jekyll: Refer to Jekyll official documentation for information on how to install.
• Code Editor: Visual Studio Code or Sublime Text are recommended.

Usage

There are several relevant and useful commands Jekyll offers to assist with local development:

• jekyll serve -w: Launches a local web server with regeneration of files if edited
• jekyll build: Compiles the website code under ./_site
• jekyll clean: Cleans all generated files & cache

For more information, see Jekyll useful commands documentation.

Infrastructure

Pre-Requisites

Provisioning the AWS resources for this site requires the following steps be followed:

1. Set-up an AWS account & create a Programmic Access Key Pair
2. Purchase the Domain & create Hosted Zone in Route53; noting the Hosted Zone ID
3. Create a S3 bucket for terraform state file to be stored called 'domain-terraform' (ie. testdomain-terraform)
4. Create GitHub Action secrets for the following values:
   • AWS_ACCESS_KEY
   • AWS_SECRET_KEY
   • ZONE_ID

Deployment

The deployment of both the website and underlying infrastructure can be completed using GitHub Actions. There are 2 'workflows' which deploy these respectively.

Infrastructure

The deployment of the AWS infrastructure is a manual, one off process which is required before the website can be deployed.

Steps:

1. Login to the GitHub Respository

2. Go to 'Actions' tab

3. Click 'Terraform Deployment'

4. Click 'Run workflow' & provide the required variables:

   • Use workflow from 'Branch: main'
   • Domain name: the root domain name of the website you are looking to host (ie testdomain.net)
   • AWS Region: the AWS region to deploy resources to (ie. us-east-1)
   • Destroy: Set to true if you wish to destroy the environment

Website

The deployment of the website is automatically triggered based on commit actions to the 'main' branch.

This workflow will build the Jekyll website & deploy the generated files to the S3 Bucket (previously deployed with the Terraform workflow) to be used as a static-website.

Authors

• huewood