Static Website AWS

This template provides a simple static website that is deployed on a global CloudFront CDN provided by AWS.

• Deploy any static website files
• Very fast load times due to deployment using AWS CloudFront CDN
• Easy to use scripts for standing up infrastructure (yarn infra up) and deployment (yarn deploy)
• Out of the box support for SSL without additional costs (using AWS certificates)
• Optimised deployment script for fast and safe upload of changes
• Very low cost hosting

The following key properties need to be configured for this template:

• Hosted Zone Domain: A Route 53 hosted zone to which the Primary Website Domain and Redirect Website Domain can be added as records. For instance, the hosted zone domain mysite.com would allow adding the primary domain mysite.com and the redirect domain www.mysite.com. For more details, please check Hosted Zone Configuration in the Goldstack documentation.
• Primary Website Domain: This is the domain your users will use to view the site. For instance, if you configure the domain mysite.com, users will be able to view your site by opening the URL https://mysite.com.
• Redirect Website Domain: This is a domain that will redirect all requests to your Primary Website Domain. The redirect website domain must be different to the Primary Website Domain. For instance, if you configure the domain mysite.com as your primary domain, you can configure www.mysite.com as your redirect domain. Users will be redirected to https://mysite.com when they attempt to open the URL https://www.mysite.com.
• Default Cache Duration: The number of seconds that files will be cached in the AWS content delivery network. Setting this to 120 for instance, would mean that, unless otherwise specified, webpages and other resources will be cached for 120 s. In that case, when a new version of a page is deployed, it can take up to 120 s for changes to appear when accessing the deployed version of the application.

yarn infra up [deploymentName]

Note that you will not be able to access your website yet. First run a deployment as described below.

yarn deploy [deploymentName]

You should now be able to view your website on the domain name you have configured. You can find the domain name in goldstack.json under "deployments" and there the property "websiteDomain" for your selected deployment.

Development

This module allows publishing simple static websites. You can start developing your website by modifying the files in the web/ folder or copy and paste the files of an existing website in there. The module will deploy all files from this folder to the AWS infrastructure.

All infrastructure for this module is defined in Terraform. You can find the Terraform files for this template in the directory [moduleDir]/infra/aws. You can define multiple deployments for this template, for instance for development, staging and production environments.

If you configured AWS deployment before downloading your project, the deployments and their respective configurations are defined in [moduleDir]/goldstack.json.

The configuration tool will define one deployment. This will be either dev or prod depending on your choice during project configuration. In the example goldstack.json below, a deployment with the name dev is defined.

{
  "$schema": "./schemas/package.schema.json",
  "name": "...",
  "template": "...",
  "templateVersion": "...",
  "configuration": {},
  "deployments": [
    {
      "name": "dev",
      "awsRegion": "us-west-2",
      "awsUser": "awsUser",
      "configuration": {
        ...
      }
    }
  ]
}

Infrastructure Commands

Infrastructure commands for this template can be run using yarn. There are four commands in total:

• yarn infra up: For standing up infrastructure.
• yarn infra init: For initialising Terraform.
• yarn infra plan: For running Terraform plan.
• yarn infra apply: For running Terraform apply.
• yarn infra destroy: For destroying all infrastructure using Terraform destroy.
• yarn infra upgrade: For upgrading the Terraform versions (supported by the template). To upgrade to an arbitrary version, use yarn infra terraform.
• yarn infra terraform: For running arbitrary Terraform commands.

For each command, the deployment they should be applied to must be specified.

yarn infra [command] [deploymentName]

For instance, to stand up the infrastructure for the dev deployment, the following command would need to be issued:

yarn infra up dev

Generally you will only need to run yarn infra up. However, if you are familiar with Terraform and want more fine-grained control over the deployment of your infrastructure, you can also use the other commands as required.

Note that for running yarn infra terraform, you will need to specify which command line arguments you want to provide to Terraform. By default, no extra arguments are provided:

yarn infra terraform [deployment] plan

If extra arguments are needed, such as variables, you can use the --inject-variables option, such as for running terraform plan:

yarn infra terraform [deployment] --inject-variables plan

If you want to interact with the remote backend, you can also provide the --inject-backend-config option, such as for running terraform init:

yarn infra terraform [deployment] --inject-backend-config init

Customizing Terraform

Goldstack templates make it very easy to customize infrastructure to your specific needs. The easiest way to do this is to simply edit the *.tf files in the infra/aws folder. You can make the changes you need and then run yarn infra up [deploymentName] to apply the changes.

The infra/aws folder contains a file variables.tf that contains the variables required for your deployment; for instance the domain name for a website. The values for these variables are defined in the module's goldstack.json file in the "configuration" property. There is one global configuration property that applies for all deployments and each deployment also has its own configuration property. In order to add a new variable, add the variable to variables.tf and then add it to the configuration for your template or to the configurations for the deployments.

Note that due to JavaScript and Terraform using different conventions for naming variables, Goldstack applies a basic transformation to variable names. Camel-case variables names are converted to valid variables names for Terraform by replacing every instance of a capital letter C with _c in the variable name. For instance:

myVariableName in the Goldstack configuration will translate to the Terraform variable my_variable_name as defined in variables.tf.

Terraform State

In order to manage your infrastructure, Terraform maintains a state for each deployment; to calculate required changes when the infrastructure is updated and also for destroying the infrastructure if it is no longer required. Goldstack by default will store the terraform state in the infra/aws folder as simple files.

This works well for deploying infrastructure from your local development environment but is not a good choice when building a CI/CD pipeline for the infrastructure definition. In that case, it is better to define Remote State. A popular choice many projects adopt here is to store the state in an S3 bucket. Please see the Terraform documentation for further details.

This template can be packaged up and deployed to the deployments specified in goldstack.json. Note that deployment will only work after the infrastructure for the respective deployment has been stood up. To deploy your package, run the following script:

yarn deploy [deploymentName]