There’s a ton of posts already on how to set up static sites hosted on S3 via CloudFront. This isn’t going to be one of them. What I want to discuss is some weirdness that I encountered with setting up this blog. For the purpose of this post we’re going to assume that you are going to create a hypothetical static site: https://example.com
If you host a static site on hardware, or a VPS (be it an EC2 instance or a DigitalOcean Droplet) you’ll most likely do this with one of the various available web servers, like nginx or apache, and use a service like Let’s Encrypt to create the TLS certificate....
I’ve spent this year building networks using Amazon Web Services and teaching people how to do it. So I’d like to share the code that I’ve used as teaching examples and as seeds for the creation of some pretty cool environments.
AWS PY was my first published attempt at interacting with AWS in python & Puppet to instantiate, provision and control EC2 instances, as well as the seed for an incredibly cool project at the start of this year....
Sam Newman recently published a very interesting blog entry on using fabric to apply puppet scripts on remote machines. He left the provision_using_boto() method as an exercise to the reader. That just sounded tempting enough to be a challenge since I hadn't gotten around to looking at boto. You can find the result of my attempt on GitHub. To be precise aws.py implements the provisioning using boto and fabfile.py drives fabric and puppet....
It is now possible to invalidate objects (files) in AWS CloudFront distributions. Handy when someone, like me, occasionally publishes files with the wrong content type. Here is how I implement this invalidation in python....
I've released a new version of my S3DropBox on GitHub. I've moved the project to GitHub so that I can have all my current active projects in one place. Check it out in its new home at https://github.com/tomcz/s3dropbox.
This release uses the AWS java libraries. They are finally good enough for me to stop creating my own wheels and vulcanising my own rubber. As a bonus the S3DropBox creates URLs in virtual hosted format (eg....
Another update to my S3DropBox. Due to popular demand (ahem) I've added a progress bar to track uploads and downloads. You now have something pretty to watch rather than a screenful of dots. Any other requests?...
I've released a new version of my S3DropBox. You can now right-click on any file to download it, delete it or create a public link to it. Comments, feedback and bugs are always welcome....
I love feedback ... including bugs (thanks Cam). The S3DropBox will now only permit the creation of a bucket when Amazon S3 returns a HTTP 404 status code in response to a HTTP HEAD request for the bucket prior to creation. The new version can now be downloaded from http://code.google.com/p/s3dropbox/....
This release now permits the S3DropBox to be used in corporate environments (ie. behind authenticated proxies), including being able to handle NTLM authentication with proxies. HTTPS support has been enabled, although HTTP is still used by default. Check out the new release here....
In June of 2008 I released the initial version of the S3DropBox as a download available from this blog (see S3DropBox). Since then I've been adding little enhancements to the drop box as updates to the linked zip files. This of course is not the right way to share an application or its code-base, so I've created a google code project at http://code.google.com/p/s3dropbox/. Feedback, patches and wish-list items are always welcome....