SSL with AWS S3

17 Dec 2017

I’ve finally completed the move from Jeykll to Middleman, and migrated the old blog to cooksey.io on AWS S3.

I’ve started to fill out the landing page, but it was a little embarrassing that I still hadn’t set up SSL. You might say, why do you care about SSL on a static site that takes no user input? Well, a lot of reasons, but th most important reason was that not having it bothered me.

I followed a helpful article by Sebastian Buckpesch, though some of the AWS stuff has changed since his article, and I didn’t need to use Route 53 for email.

Installing SSL is usually pretty trivial, but it turns out that it isn’t very trivial with hosting on AWS’s S3!

Luckily, Namecheap, my domain and DNS provider – because screw GoDaddy, offers straight-forward email forwarding that allowed me to prove ownership of cooksey.io in AWS Certificate Manager.

After getting the SSL cert, I was able to use AWS CloudFront for two benefits:

  • Distribute the site across AWS’s datacenter to help load speed and add redundancy
  • Get a CloudFront URL that covers all datacenter’s and allows me to create a CNAME DNS record

I’m still really happy with CodeShip + AWS CLI being my CI/CD deploy pipeline. This post will be the first merge to master since setting up SSL and CloudFront.

Hopefully this post will serve as a successful test that my deploy pipeline still works after moving to CloudFront.

We’ll see in about 15 minutes. :)

I hope you’re all having a good time with the holidays and what not!