Jekyll Static Web Hosting – Deployment Pipeline on AWS (opens in new tab)

I had some static sites on Firebase and moved them to Netlify because the build tools were excellent, not to mention built in form handling.

I totally agree. I just started hosting all of my static sites on Netlify, and it's so much better than the custom deploy script I had written. I registered a domain with Namecheap, and was hosting a simple index.html on Netlify within 5 minutes (including SSL.)

I am a recent convert to Netlify and I love it. A++. I have never had SSL on my personal website because doing so is such a hassle; not only does everything Just Work, but getting that set up was trivial.

Netlify is fantastic. It works great. I'm usig it git GitLab and it's a pleasure.

We use Netlify and find there are quite often (every few weeks) outages and caching issues.

Another happy Netlify customer here. I work as a web dev so not only do I run several of my own sites there but I manage production clients' websites on Netlify as well. Couldn't be more pleased with the service!

I've been looking for a paid alternative to Github Pages and this is looking great. Thanks for the tip.

Couldn't agree more. I love tinkering around with things and building setups just to learn, but for something like a personal webpage I just want simple.

I use hugo and then setup my output folder (where the generated output goes) as a git repo. Generate the site -> git commit/push -> Caddy. Caddy has a feature to pull in content from a git repo so when you couple that with the built-in Let's Encrypt support it makes it dead simple.

I use a very similar system for static sites that I maintain. I edit my site in my favorite text editor and run 'git push'. :)

It was a bit of work to get everything running, but there's very little to actually maintain afterward. I'm definitely going to start replicating the setup elsewhere (including my own homepage, which is currently down due to its VPS having failed hard and me not having enough time to rebuild it).

Agreed on this front. Github pages is super simple with Jekyll. Literally push to your branch and it's deployed. This seems a bit overkill. Still interesting though.

That's pretty much what I ended up doing as well, albeit with my own static site builder scripts. Each time I build my site[1], the deployment script is just a directory rsync. No mess, no fuss.

You are also right about not needing a CDN. My site has occasionally become momentarily popular and my $5 hosting VM hasn't even blinked on my completely static site. A database is a fine thing but you don't want to be serving web pages out of one. Thats why I finally ditched WordPress.

[1] https://sheep.horse/tagcloud.html#computing - a complete waste of your time.

I use a git hook on the server to rebuild on push. I do the same for a few configuration files (the hook takes care of copying the file and reloading the daemon). If you're the only user, it's perhaps the simplest (and fastest) option, although it does mean you need a git client to update stuff. Thankfully, there's SGit for Android.

I build an nginx Docker image that serves the Jekyll output and push that. I have an Ansible docker_container task that pulls and runs it. Done, couldn't be happier.

This is almost line-for-line my setup.

I like the CodeBuild solution for the times when I'm editing on my phone or a shared computer. I push to GitHub, and CodeBuild handles:

* build (as above, plus asset processing and minification)

* deploy (s3 sync, plus some fiddling to add 301 redirects)

* ping search engines

I keep a lot of drafts and temporary notes in my local checkouts and doing build/deploy on a fresh checkout helps to ensure they don't slip onto the public website.

related: I wrote a plugin to do the same for Jekyll, although it does not (yet) do cloudfront invalidation: https://github.com/thom-nic/jekyll-s3_deploy

Dear lord, you need aws, hooks, travis file at minimum.

There are quite a few reasons, if we compare 'self-hosted' setups.

It's simpler on the server as you say, you can serve the files from pretty much anywhere. You also need less resources to do so. I appreciate the cache idea, used to do it myself with wordpress, still do with MyBB, but it's imperfect and there are always misses, espceially if someone is actively cache busting you to DOS your site.

Much less hassle to setup. If you're going to do it 'properly' you're going to want to set up your dynamic site to run in a chroot jail, run the php process under a unique user per site (especially with nginx), setup unique database users and databases per site, secure your credentials, have a version control setup and update functionality and on and on. There's a lot to do. You can automate it (I have) but it's still annoying and requires monitoring.

You can move almost anywhere almost instantly, with just a git push/rsync and a DNS change.

Hugely reduced attack surface. It's literally a collection of text files.

The benefits are somewhat reduced if you get someone else to manage your hosting for you, but it remains simpler to move and usually cheaper to host as you need no database service.

Version control matters, too. Ever seen a whole bunch of Wordpress content lost forever due to some sort of site failure? I have. Editors matter. I'd rather use a good professional editor like Sublime for large-scale writing, than some wonky web page thing.

Web sites are software products. If you think like a coder, you want to run them like a coder. If I were just a writer, I'd probably think very differently.

Github Pages is missing a couple of features, namely:

* Build systems besides Jekyll

* HTTPS for custom domains

...but the second problem can easily be solved with Cloudflare and the first one can be solved with a git subtree push. Beyond this it's pretty fully featured.

I use a free EC2 micro instance and a custom Node-based SSG, and it feels snappy and is always up: https://sdegutis.com source: https://github.com/sdegutis/sdegutis.com