Hugo and AWS/S3

https://petersmith.org/blog/2016/12/11/hugo-and-aws-s3/ 11 Dec '16 12:53 Peter Smith AWSS3

This site, and a few others I have, are built using Hugo. Until today, I have been hosting the sites on a spare Raspberry Pi I had lying around at home. That is all well and good, but I think I want something more robust.

So today, I have moved the site to AWS using S3. There are a lot of tutorials/guides on how to do this, and here is my summary.

1. Set up a bucket on S3. The name should be the same name as the site; e.g. in this case it it petersmith.org
2. On S3, configure the bucket to be a static website, and set-up the Index Document to be index.html and the Error Document to be 404.html (or what ever matches your configuration
3. Copy your local site (typically in the public directory of your hugo installation) to S3. I use s3cmd put -P --recursive public/ s3://petersmith.org
4. Change your DNS to point to the S3 bucket. Specifically, set a CNAME record to point to the S3 bucket. The bucket will have a name something like petersmith.org.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com.

Then you are done.

If you want to have https on your site, then that is another story. You will still set up S3, but then you also need to set up CloudFront. That is something for another day.

I did a bad bad thing and my email stopped working. If you point your naked domain (in my case petersmith.org) to AWS, it effectively masks the MX records in the DNS, and so mail stops working.

The right thing to do is:

1. Set up a bucket with a name like www.petersmith.org and put all the content there.
2. On your DNS set up a CNAME record for www pointing to the new S3 bucket; i.e., petersmith.org.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com
3. Set a A record on the DNS to point to 174.129.25.170 at wwwizer. It's not their main business but it works.

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