Building This Site

Back in the early 2000s, I created gaming-related sites and blogs using PHP and Wordpress. Now, I thought it would be a nice idea to dive back a bit into the web with a personal website. It’s also a good excuse to explore AWS services.

This site is built using Hugo and the Congo theme. It is deployed to AWS via a Github action. Here’s a quick rundown of what I did:

• Purchased a domain name
• Requested an SSL Certificate through AWS Certificate Manager
• Created an S3 bucket to store my site
• Setup CloudFront distribution with the S3 bucket as the Origin
• Added the Custom SSL Certificate and the domain name to my CloudFront distribution once the certificate was ready
• Pushed my Hugo Site to Github
• Created a Github action to automatically update the S3 bucket whenever I push changes

Unfortunately I ran into issues with links. After an unsuccessful attempt to resolve it by asking ChatGPT, I ended up finding this valuable info:

When it comes to a post, we’re no longer being helped by built-in redirection provided by S3 or CloudFront. We need to build it our self. We know Hugo likes to add a trailing / to each page. But we need it to end in /index.html instead. That’s where CloudFront Functions come in.

You can read more about it here. It’s not ideal but I can confirm that it works. My site is finally up and running!