- Create a certificate-signed RDP shortcut via Group Policy - Fri, Aug 9 2019
- Monitor web server uptime with a PowerShell script - Tue, Aug 6 2019
- How to build a PowerShell inventory script for Windows Servers - Fri, Aug 2 2019
Setting up the S3 bucket
First, you'll need to have an S3 bucket. You can either use one yourself or create a new one. While logged into your AWS Management Console, navigate to the S3 service and click on Create Bucket.
Creating an S3 Bucket
We don't need to configure anything other than the defaults here, so click through the short wizard to create your S3 bucket.
Enabling static website hosting
Once you've created your bucket, click on it and then select Properties. This will bring you to a screen where you should see a Static website hosting option.
Static website hosting option
Select Static website hosting and then select Use this bucket to host a website, ensuring you've set your main index document and error document you'll have in your S3 bucket. Also, make sure you copy the endpoint. This will be the URL to your site after configuration.
Enabling the S3 bucket for hosting
Enabling public read access
Next, you'll need to give everyone access to your website. To do this, you'll first need to relax the public access settings. Click on Public Access Settings under the Permissions tab, click Edit, and then uncheck Block new public bucket policies.
Unblocking public policies
After unblocking this, head over to Bucket Policy, paste in the below bucket policy, and click on Save.
{
"Version":"2012-10-17",
"Statement":[{
"Sid":"PublicReadForGetBucketObjects",
"Effect":"Allow",
"Principal": "*",
"Action":["s3:GetObject"],
"Resource":["arn:aws:s3:::<my bucket name>/*"
]
}
]
}Uploading an index document
After you've created the S3 bucket, enabled static website hosting, and given the public read access to the bucket, the website should now be live!
However, navigating to the endpoint URL now will yield a forbidden message. This is because even though the website is active, the service hosting the site can't find any pages to serve up. Let's fix that.
Create a simple index.html page that looks something like this:
<html><body>Hello, world!</body></html>
Go to your S3 bucket settings again, and in the Overview tab, click on Upload to upload the index.html document to the root of the bucket.
Testing out the static website
Once you've uploaded the test index.html file, navigate to your endpoint URL in a web browser. If you do this immediately, you may still receive an Access Denied error. I ran into this when building the website for this article. However, if you wait a few minutes, the website will come up and tell you Hello, world! by rendering the index.html file we created above.
Subscribe to 4sysops newsletter!
Summary
After configuring the site, you now have the option to upload as many web assets as you'd like. The web service in S3 will render any HTML, CSS, or other web assets you place in this S3 bucket just as if it were running on an "actual" web server. And, if you'll notice, the speed will be lightning fast because there's no database backend to worry about.
