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Super Smooth Deployments with React and AWS

Your deploys have never been so pain-free.

About this guide

This guide will help you register a domain and set it up with Route53, Cloudfront and S3 to have a smooth deployment process.

Overall architecture

  • Webpack creates your build in the /dist/$GIT_HASH folder. The $GIT_HASH here is important, as it means that every resource can be uniquely identified. This means we can indefinitely cache resources without worrying about invalidations.
  • We upload the contents of the /dist folder to s3://$S3_BUCKET/$ENVIRONMENT. (i.e. each deploy creates a new folder in your s3://$S3_BUCKET/$ENVIRONMENT folder.)
  • To deploy, we simply copy index.html from s3://$S3_BUCKET/$ENVIRONMENT/$GIT_HASH/ to s3://$S3_BUCKET/$ENVIRONMENT/, making sure to specify that this file should never be cached. All resources (CSS, JS, etc.) that you request from this index.html file will be requested from their $GIT_HASH folders, and can be cached indefinitely.
  • Cloudfront will compress these files and serve them from S3.
  • Route53 will convert an ugly cloudfront URL to a pretty URL.

Setup the deployment process

Ok! Let's create the deployment process.

CircleCI

If you complete the following steps, you should be able to push a new version to the repository.

  • Clone this repository using Github.
  • If you do not have a CircleCI account, create one. Then, associate it with your Github account.
  • Create an AWS account.
  • Go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home and create a user (e.g. Circle-CI), to which you should add programmatic access and AmazonS3FullAccess permissions.
  • Add its Access Key ID and Secret Access Key to CircleCI by going to Project Settings | AWS Permissions.
  • Decide on a name for your S3 bucket. In build.sh, deploy.sh and upload.sh, change aws-pres to the name of your bucket. We will have this $S3_BUCKET.

Now, push your changes to Github and open up CircleCI. You should see your build succeed, and your S3 bucket should have the following structure:

staging/index.html
staging/$SOME_HASH/index.html
staging/$SOME_HASH/bundle.js
staging/$SOME_HASH/cutedog.png

S3

  • Go to [https://console.aws.amazon.com/s3/home](AWS S3).
  • Create a bucket named $S3_BUCKET.
  • Click on your bucket, click properties, and enable static website hosting. Amazon requires that you need to specify an index document, even though in this case we will not be using it. I put unused.
  • Take note of the endpoint. It should be similar to $S3_BUCKET.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.
  • You can, optionally, set up a bucket lifecycle policy to delete files after a certain amount of time.

Cloudfront

  • Go to [https://console.aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/home](AWS Cloudfront).
  • You'll be creating one cloudfront distribution per environment. For this demo, we'll just worry about setting up a staging cloudfront distribution.
  • Create a web distribution with the following settings. Be careful! These settings are intricate and hard to debug.
    • Origin domain name: from the dropdown, select your S3 bucket
    • Origin path: Name of the environment, with a slash in front. In this demo, /staging
    • Viewer protocol policy: Redirect HTTP to HTTPS
    • Forward headers: Whitelist
    • Whitelist headers: Origin
    • Compress Objects Automatically: Yes
    • Price class: I always set the cheapest price class (US, Canada and EU)
    • Alternative Domain Names: In this example, staging.$YOUR_DOMAIN, e.g. in my case, staging.myawspresentation.com
    • SSL Certificate: You will need to go back, after setting up your Route 53 settings, and select the appropriate certificate (*.$YOUR_DOMAIN).
    • Default Root Object: index.html
    • Click create! It will take up to an hour for the cloudfront distribution to deploy. You can continue without waiting for it to complete.

Route 53 and Certificate Manager

  • Go to [https://console.aws.amazon.com/route53/home](AWS Route53) and [https://console.aws.amazon.com/acm/home](AWS Certificate Manager).
  • You will do the following steps once per environment. In this demo, we'll just worry about staging.
  • Register a domain with Route53. It may take Amazon a few minutes to complete your registration, after which you will receive a confirmation email.
  • After your Route53 registration is complete, you can request a certificate for *.$YOUR_DOMAIN. Use the AWS Certificate Manager to request this. Once this approval completes, you will receive a confirmation email.
    • Once you complete this, go back to your Cloudfront distribution, click on your distribution, Distribution Settings | General | Edit, and select this certificate.
  • Go to Route 53, and click Create Record Set.
    • Name: Fill in the environment name, e.g. staging
    • Alias: Yes
    • Alias target: Select your cloudfront distribution