Who wants to know how I made this website?
Well, I wanted to have something very lightweight, super fast and easy to manage. My objective was to create a personal blog where I can write and publish easily. So did the following:
- Domain: Got a domain under my name (I bought from dynadot.com). In my AWS account, set up a hosted zone in Route 53 with my domain name. Then copied the name servers and added them in dynadot DNS settings of my domain.
- Static website: In AWS S3 created two buckets - tashfin.com and www.tashfin.com. In tashfin.com bucket enabled static website hosting, unchecked block all public access and added policy to read objects publicly. Then copied the bucket endpoint and went back to Route 53 and created an A record with alias pointing to the bucket. Similar setup is for www bucket except static website redirected (http for now) to main domain.
- SSL Certificate: In AWS Certificate Manager created two ssl certificates for the domain name and for the www domain.
- CDN: Created two distributions in AWS Cloudfront, pasted the bucket endpoint as origin, set viewer protocol policy redirect http to https, set alternate domain name as my domain name and selected the SSL certificate generated earlier. Once they are live, changed the Route 53 domain records to redirect to this distributions as alias. Also changed the www redirection from http to https in s3.
- Static site generator: I used Publii for this. Downloaded the mac version and a theme. Created a user in AWS IAM with full s3 control policy. Copied the credentials of the user to the server option in Publii, set the domain name with https, set bucket name, set ACL as bucket owner full control. Changed the theme, did minor changes. Then I created a post and synced to website. I used their WYSIWYG editor.
More or less thats it. I know it's a bit technical but there are lots of help available in internet and once all setup is done, its easy to manage and on top or that its super fast. Why did I choose the tools I used? well that's another article.