Building a CloudFront log parser for Hugo with Kiro CLI.

And some surprise outcomes!

When I started creating content for the AWS Community Builder program, like many people I started with WordPress. However, it was too complex, had a lot of functionality I didn’t need, and more importantly would have needed a server running somewhere to host it.

All of that led me to looking at static web site generators fairly quickly - a great advantage of this is that you can host them in GitHub or something similar; or given I’m an AWS Community Builder, build it on AWS. And that’s what I described in my article Hosting a Static Website on AWS; just S3, CloudFront and not a server to be seen. I could even tie in a really simple pipeline that would regenerate the site as I commited my changes to a git repo (more info here).

But how do you know that this approach works - I could access the site and see the pages, but how could I see what others were doing and that it worked for them? I did setup Google Analytics, thanks to a Hugo integration, but it felt over the top, and it’s been niggling away for well over a year, that I wanted a different, more aligned solution.

Hosting a Hugo static website in AWS

This post is part of a series about hosting a static website, and I’ll be talking about the infrastructure needed to host the website in AWS, and how to deploy via infrastructure as code (IaC). In this post, we’ll use Terraform to describe the infrastructure we want to deploy

Our infrastructure

I use Hugo to run this blog - it generates static HTML pages based on files written with Markdown which means that I don’t need to worry about running servers. To host this blog, I deploy several resources into an AWS account to host this blog, as shown below: