Coffee Store Web Basic - Deploying a website on AWS

There are many ways of hosting websites. If you want to host on AWS it's not as easy as it could be, but this example will get you started.

Introduction

Deploying a "static" website on AWS is surprisingly tricky - it requires managing S3, CloudFront, the security between them, Route 53, and more. This example project helps you get started using AWS CDK to deploy a website.

If you are looking to do this with "vanilla" CloudFormation, see the older version of this project in the CloudFormation branch.

This example is part of a collection of CDK examples - others are as follows:

• CDK bare-bones app for TypeScript - Base project for any TypeScript app using CDK for deployment to AWS. Try this first if you are getting started with CDK.
• Coffee Store Web Full - An extension of this project that is a real working demo of a production-ready website, including TLS certificates, DNS, Github Actions Workflows, multiple CDK environments (prod vs test vs dev). Head straight to this project if you already familiar with CDK and deploying websites to AWS.
• Coffee Store V2 - Includes a Lambda Function resource; source code + build for the Lambda Function; unit + in-cloud integration tests

How this example works

This example deploys a CDK App that uses S3 and CloudFront to host a website.

Most of the work is performed by a custom CDK construct I have written - cdk-website - and I encourage you to read the documentation in that project for more background.

Prerequistes

Please see the prerequisites of the cdk-bare-bones project - they are the same as for this one.

Deployment

After cloning this project to your local machine, run the following:

$ npm install && npm run deploy

If successful, the end result will look something like this:

coffee-store-web: creating CloudFormation changeset...

 ✅  CoffeeStoreWeb (coffee-store-web)

✨  Deployment time: 292.86s

Outputs:
CoffeeStoreWeb.CloudFrontUrl = d3p8vqr2dw4uqj.cloudfront.net
Stack ARN:
arn:aws:cloudformation:us-east-1:123456789012:stack/coffee-store-web/d92ffbc0-18d3-11ed-b23b-12285e0da875

✨  Total time: 298.94s

Assuming deployment is successful then load the CoffeeStoreWeb.CloudFrontUrl value (the one ending in cloudfront.net) from your version of the output in a browser - you should the see a message saying "Hello Coffee World!"

Once you've run npm install once in the directory you won't need to again

For other commands, including how to teardown, see the Usage section of the bare-bones project README

Next steps

The most immediate thing you'll want to do next is deploy some actually interesting content. By default this project uploads everything from src/site to your site, so you can just change the contents of that directory. Alternatively if your site has a build process you may want to run that first, and change the content -> path property in app.ts to point to your build output folder.

Other next steps including custom domain names, setting up multiple environments, using Github Actions, and more, can be found in the larger Coffee Store Web Full project.

CDK Style

My style of using CDK is a little different from the default templates provided by AWS. For more details, and reasoning, see the Motivation section of the bare-bones project Readme.

Scaling and Cost

All of the primary resources in this example are serverless - in other words they automatically scale according to actual load, and their costs are tied to this load. Your biggest cost will likely be CloudFront - see the CloudFront pricing page here.

Questions / Feedback / etc.

If you have questions related to this example please add a Github issue, or drop me a line at mike@symphonia.io . I'm also on Twitter at @mikebroberts .

Changelog

2022.1

• Move cdk.json to src/cdk directory. This is for a couple of reasons:
  • One fewer file in project root, which I think is A Good Thing
  • Makes it easier to have repos with multiple, separate, CDK apps
• Modify app.ts to point to new (relative) location of site content
• Move output and requireApproval CDK settings from package.json to cdk.json
  • I hadn't read the docs enough to know they could be in cdk.json. Oops. This way is cleaner
• Add package-lock.json - these are specific dependency versions I've tested with