Moving to S3
Sooooo I finally decided it was time to shut down the server I’ve ran for the past 8 years. In doing that I’ve had to start moving the various sites and services I ran on it to other places. That includes this site.
In the end, since this is a static website, I decided to go ahead and host it on Amazon S3, especially since they recently announced that they have given sites on S3 the ability to host their root zone as a website there.
So I went and looked for directions on Amazon’s website and found this walkthrough. It’s pretty easy to follow. The only slightly annoying thing is that you need to use Route53 for your nameservers, which meant I had to move it away from my registrar. That didn’t bother me too much in the end - I don’t have any particular love for GoDaddy these days, and the domain for this website is tiny.
So first things first. At first I considered writing my own script for pushing the files on my site up to Amazon. After playing with it in boto, I decided to have a look around and see what else was out there. That’s when I found s3cmd.
It filled all my needs, specifically the sync functionality. So I installed it on my Mac laptop using Homebrew. Once that was done, I went ahead and wrote a simple script that would handle a few things for me:
- Run Tinkerer to compile the static site.
- Updated my sitemap using the Google Sitemap Generator
- Call s3cmd to push my site up to S3.
I’ve gone ahead and pushed that script up to github (along with the rest of the site). You can find it here: s3push.
One other file that’s worth looking at is my .gitignore - I updated it so that I wouldn’t push my refreshed sitemap everytime I update the site.
Anyway, as you can see from the script, this is all super easy to do, and now you’re reading this site through the magic of S3.
Let me know if you have any questions or need a hand if you try to do the same and I’ll do my best!