Show HN: Scar – Static websites with HTTPS, a global CDN, and custom domains

Looks very similar to my project <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kkuchta&#x2F;scarr" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;kkuchta&#x2F;scarr</a> from a while back. It even uses the same acronym (I assume that&#x27;s just a coincidence, since we both just picked a cool-sounding english-language word using the initials from S3, Cloudfront, ACM, and ACM.<p>At a glance: - Mine handles domain registration + ACM verification automatically - This one wisely uses clioudformation instead of api calls - This one does apex-&gt;ww redirects, whereas mine uses the apex and has no redirect<p>Seems pretty cool!

GitHub pages [0] gives you static sites with HTTPS and a custom domain without nearly as much complexity as this if you&#x27;re looking for an alternative to Netlify.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.github.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;pages.github.com&#x2F;</a>

Am I the only one who still hosts my own static sites on a plain old virtual machine?<p>It&#x27;s pretty simple to configure nginx for static sites, and by doing it yourself you reduce vendor lockin to just about nil.<p>Even if S3 is massively cheaper, $5&#x2F;month for a tiny VM seems like a small price to pay for being vendor-abstract.<p>I suppose S3 is way less likely to suffer a meaningful outage than my little VM, but how many 9s do my personal websites actually need?

Nice project.<p>As an aside, I genuinely wonder under which circumstances a CDN will be useful for a static website nowadays. I have a static website that has been on the HN homepage a few times and got picked up by the Chrome mobile recommendations and a nginx&#x2F;https with slightly tweaked configuration never had a problem handling the traffic even on the smallest DO droplet.<p>Edit: Thanks for these replies.

We use a combination of Netlify + Webflow + Hugo for our website (www.facetdev.com). With that we get a global CDN and our website will never go down.<p>Netlify has been awesome and it made it stupid easy to combine our www site on Webflow with a hugo static blog in a subfolder (&#x2F;blog). This might be my favorite web publishing workflow ever.<p>If you haven&#x27;t tried Netlify yet, definitely give it a look.

I wrote a tutorial for how to do all this setup manually, if you prefer: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.davidbaumgold.com&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;host-static-site-aws-s3-cloudfront&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.davidbaumgold.com&#x2F;tutorials&#x2F;host-static-site-aws...</a><p>Sometimes it’s nice to understand how all the pieces fit together, instead of using an automated system!

How much does this cost? I put in some more effort to setup my HAProxy and nginx containers on a Vultr node, but I get LetsEncrypt for free, so I&#x27;m just paying for a Vultr node (or DO droplet) and the price of the domain name:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sumdog&#x2F;bee2" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;sumdog&#x2F;bee2</a>

I have a two-line Makefile that with one target that sync&#x27;s my website with an S3 bucket. Deploys are instant. The rest is handled by Cloudflare an AWS. The sheer number of moving parts in this system is outrageous for a static website. A fun project for sure, though.

Bundling service config and launch makes the whole process easier, for sure. There&#x27;s also more than one way to configure this depending on what your needs are, so it&#x27;d be cool to have a few different versions of SCAR.<p>I started with a setup similar to your diagram and tweaked it when I realized S3 didn&#x27;t serve index.html when the URL was just the parent &quot;directory&quot;, i.e. example.com&#x2F;foo&#x2F; doesn&#x27;t resolve to s3:&#x2F;&#x2F;example.com&#x2F;foo&#x2F;index.html. To get this working I had to write a bit of JS in a Lambda function and deploy it at the edge of my CloudFront distribution to do some URL rewriting.<p>Given that&#x27;s the behavior most people expect, might be worth considering?

Recently moved some static sites from S3 to AWS Amplify Console. Super easy setup and even easier maintenance with the Git-based workflow: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;amplify&#x2F;console&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;aws.amazon.com&#x2F;amplify&#x2F;console&#x2F;</a>

Anyone have an a average monthly fee for using these as hosting solution? last time i ran the numbers using all that services go from 5 to 10 USD per month and was better to use amazon lightsail (3.5 per month) or other cheaper alternatives at lowendbox

For anyone looking for a hosted solution, <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;surge.sh&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;surge.sh&#x2F;</a> is super nice and simple without any of the complexity of managing the stack yourself. Deploying uses one simple command, and you get hosting and custom domains for free, though I believe SSL is paid for custom domains. (I&#x27;m not affiliated with Surge at all, just a happy user.)

Same feature set - plus a few extras like Basic Auth support, custom headers, preventing direct access to the underlying S3 bucket - implemented as a reusable Terraform module: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;futurice&#x2F;terraform-utils&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;aws_static_site" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;futurice&#x2F;terraform-utils&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;aws_...</a>

How is this any different from Firebase hosting? We have been using it for a while with no problem. Also comes with a very generous free tier.

Sorry to nitpick, but &quot;Copyright © 2019&quot; isn&#x27;t a &quot;license&quot;. It&#x27;s not even a full copyright declaration without listing an owner.

great job! I wish more projects have 1-click deploy to Heroku, aws, gcp or azure. This is a good habit more people should get into.<p>Running this project on aws can give a cloud beginner an interesting way to expose them to many concepts. Now I just have to figure out what static website I want to run in this!<p>Please do the same for running your own scalable wordpress install!

What benefit does this have over Netlify?

you lost me at GoDaddy

TL;DR this is an AWS stack with <i>10 AWS services</i> required to build&#x2F;deploy a static site with HTTPS&#x2F;CDN<p>I will be staying with netlify

Off topic, but what did you use to draw the flow diagram?

You&#x27;ve only taken care of the surface-level complexity with AWS. Want to do something more like add a header to the response? Well then, create a lambda, deploy it to the edge, and pay per page view. This is something Firebase is much more elegant at - the initial deploy, and then evolution and addition of features geared to static site deployment.

Try out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freepage.io" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freepage.io</a> is much easier to use than github pages. You don&#x27;t even have to create an account, verify email and all that nonsense to use it. And it has social media built in to get your page out there in to the world.

The lambda stuff is there just to upload the welcome.html?<p>Also, maybe consider configuring a logs bucket for the cloudfront logs?

This is cool, I&#x27;m glad somebody built this! I love netlify but I worry about vendor lock-in.

How much should this cost per month in AWS billing for a small static website?

This is highly complex for no reason. GitHubPages, Netify provide you with easy to use custom static page hosting.<p>Your abstraction is nice, but the learning curve for someone is incredibly high for such a setup.

This seems like a nightmare to setup and maintain for a new comer. Netlify lets us setup things in a whiff. This is a nice project but not for anyone below intermediate.

Yeah, super cool! Thanks, this was the only part I was unclear about in connecting the domain to the bucket easily..

I did the same on azure a few days ago and it was much much easier.

Just use Netlify.

Other than the notion that all traffic should be served over HTTPs, if you have purely static site, why the big fuss?

Ha I just did the exact same thing yesterday evening... Funny how stuff like this hits place one in HackerNews these days.

How to host static website with HTTPS, a global CDN and custom domains for free:<p>1. Setup public repo with Hugo project<p>2. Add Travis CI integration with GH Pages<p>3. Use CloudFlare for free SSL + other goodies<p>Why would anyone need this?