News

Dev Firm Open Sources Tool for AWS Web Site Hosting

• By David Ramel
• 09/14/2016

Development firm Oursky today announced it has open sourced a homegrown tool to simplify the process of hosting static Web sites on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

AWS Site Manager is described as a simple command-line tool that leverages Amazon CloudFront -- the AWS content delivery network (CDN) -- and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). The tool eases the complexity of using those services to host static Web sites, providing a simplified means of following best practices to set up and manage a site.

"AWS S3 + CloudFront combined is a great static site hosting solution, but can be troublesome to setup," says a blog post published today by Ben Cheng, one of a team of about 40 developers at the Hong Kong firm. "You need to set up the S3 correctly, configurable CloudFront, worry about best practices such as site redirection, sync file and invalidate CloudFront for update, etc. These are just too troublesome for hosting a static site, so we open sourced our tool AWS-site-manager."

That tool is now available on GitHub.

After setting up AWS credentials and configuration settings, developers can use the command-line tool to navigate to a project directory, create a domain and then sync the domain. That sets up an S3 bucket with the domain name along with the Web site URL, syncs local files with S3 and redirects the URL (for example, www.example.com) to the bucket (for example, example.com), the GitHub README.md file says. Developers can also set up HTTPS sites with the tool.

Cheng said the tools "is in its preliminary stages" now, with further work planned to:

• Support using gzip on CloudFront instead of S3.
• Remember config so next time you can just run aws-site-manager sync on the local folder.
• Better control on HTTP header, Custom page for Error code.
• Support using Let's Encrypt free SSL cert or ACM cert.
• Automatically configure Route-53 too.

In the meantime, interested developers were invited by Cheng to create issues if they find problems and send pull requests to Oursky.