Hosting Octopress automatically with AWS S3

Initial Setup #

You’ll need to install GPG tools suite for this. Get that and then come back.

Make sure you also have homebrew cause you’ll need it soon.

Now for AWS #

Log into your AWS account, or make one if you don’t already. Log in and go to the IAM section and then create an access key for a user. Make sure you download the secret key file. You’ll need it to install s3cmd, as it will need your AWS Secret Key.

You’ll also want to create a bucket in S3. Make sure it is the same name as your domain name you’re going to use (i.e. my bucket was named neal.codes as this domain is neal.codes).

    brew install s3cmd
    s3cmd --configure

    Enter new values or accept defaults in brackets with Enter.
    Refer to user manual for detailed description of all options.

    Access key and Secret key are your identifiers for Amazon S3
    Access Key: accesskey
    Secret Key: secretkey

    Encryption password is used to protect your files from reading
    by unauthorized persons while in transfer to S3
    Encryption password: makeyourownpassword
    Path to GPG program [/usr/local/bin/gpg]:

    When using secure HTTPS protocol all communication with Amazon S3
    servers is protected from 3rd party eavesdropping. This method is
    slower than plain HTTP and can't be used if you're behind a proxy
    Use HTTPS protocol [No]: yes

    New settings:
      Access Key: accesskey
      Secret Key: secretkey
      Encryption password: makeyourownpassword
      Path to GPG program: /usr/local/bin/gpg
      Use HTTPS protocol: True
      HTTP Proxy server name:
      HTTP Proxy server port: 0

    Test access with supplied credentials? [Y/n] y
    Please wait, attempting to list all buckets...
    Success. Your access key and secret key worked fine :-)

    Now verifying that encryption works...
    Success. Encryption and decryption worked fine :-)

    Save settings? [y/N] y
    Configuration saved to '/Users/neal/.s3cfg'

Now add all of the below to your Rakefile in your Octopress root. You’ll be able to auto-sync your local Octopress blog with the S3 bucket using the rake s3 command thereafter.

    # change deploy_default - add s3_bucket
    deploy_default = "s3"
    s3_bucket      = "neal.codes/blog" # My bucket name and domain name // notice folder name for subdirectory


    # Add this somewhere, probably in the deploy section
    desc "Deploy website to s3"
    task :s3 do
      exclude = ""
      if File.exists?('./s3-exclude')
        exclude = "--exclude-from '#{File.expand_path('./s3-exclude')}'"
      end
      puts "## Deploying website via s3cmd"
      ok_failed system("s3cmd sync --guess-mime-type --acl-public #{exclude} #{"--delete-removed" } #{public_dir}/ s3://#{s3_bucket}/")
    end

Getting your domain to point to AWS #

You’ll have to mess with whereever you bought the domain from. Edit the DNS records for your domain, and then add an CNAME record with a value of yourbucket.name.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com or something similar. Mine is neal.codes.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.

That’s all folks.