GitHub pages is awesome. Like, really awesome. But I wanted to try something new that would give me a little more flexibility (e.g. the ability to use Jekyll plugins). So I started looking around for the best way to deploy my static site to S3.

Boy, did I ever tumble down a rabbit hole. It seems like everyone’s got their own idea of how it should work, each with their custom one-off scripts that I would hate to debug, and not fully supporting what I was trying to accomplish. That’s when I remembered seeing jekyll-s3 at some point in history, so I thought I would at least check it out to see if development was still active. Well, as it turns out, development has indeed continued, just on a different project called s3_website. s3_website can deploy any set of files to Amazon S3, but Jekyll and Nanoc are supported right out of the box with no additional configuration.

s3_website is a mature and powerful tool. Not only does it deploy your site to S3, but it has a host of other features. If you set up CloudFront to distribute your website from S3s3_website will handle all the cache invalidation commands so you don’t have to worry about it. It also supports dotenv out of the box, so you can commit your configuration file without sensitive access keys.

The only downside is now I have to be at my computer to make a change to my website, but let’s be honest here—how often is that situation going to come up? Considering my last post was written nearly two years ago, not often.