Deploying a Production Ready Hugo Site With 2 Lines of Code to AWS

A site hosted on AWS S3, using a custom domain, with a CDN and a SSL certificate.

I use the CDK, a custom construct, and Python to easily deploy this site to AWS.

• Install the AWS CDK
• Python 3.6+
• Your hugo website
• An AWS account and have previously setup the AWS CLI and run aws configure
• A Route53 hosted zone and an available domain/subdoman A record (a domain or sub domain not currently in use)

Create a new directory and start a new CDK app:

mkdir cdk-app
cd cdk-app
cdk init --language python

This will generate a number of files, but the two that you care about are:

app.py
cdk_app/cdk_app_stack.py

open the cdk_app_stack.py and add the following code at the bottom of the __init__:

zone = HostedZone.from_lookup(
    self, "HostedZone", 
    domain_name="MYDOMAINNAME.COM", 
    private_zone=False
)

StaticWebsite(
    self, "serverlesslink-website",
    hosted_zone=zone,
    site_domain="BLOG.DOMAINNAME.COM",
    sources="../public",
    website_error="404.html"
)

In the first line, you will be creating a hosted zone object from a lookup, this is an existing hosted zone in Route53 and you must have access to use it.

The second line is the static website construct and it takes:

• The hosted zone you created above
• The site domain/subdomain you want to use for your hugo site
• The location of your code relative to the CDK app directory
• Optional, the error page if is not called error.html

All that is left now is to deploy the site:

cdk deploy

Now that your infrastructure is in place, all you need to do moving forward is to sync the public directory with your website bucket.

Use a script like this to sync all your data and invalidate CloudFront

#!/bin/bash
# sync.sh
hugo -D
aws s3 sync public s3://BLOG.DOMAINNAME.COM
aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id YOURDISTRIBUTIONID --paths "/*"

It will take a few minutes to see all your updates.

While working with the CDK I learned some important lessons:

For local development and deployment, it is best to pass a custom env to the application stack. Open the app.py and pass a custom env dict to the stack:

import os
from aws_cdk import core

env = core.Environment(account=os.getenv('CDK_DEFAULT_ACCOUNT'), region=os.getenv('CDK_DEFAULT_REGION'))
CdkAppStack(app, "cdk-app", env=env)

All this is saying is that if the app can’t find some custom environment variables AWS_ACCOUNT_ID and AWS_DEFAULT_REGION, to use the CDK values which come from the aws cli profile. You would use the custom env vars when deploying this in a CICD.

Simply follow the instructions in this post. I’ll try to fix this in the construct, but as of right now, you may need to do it manually.