How to Create a Static Website (on AWS)

Register for AWS

Create an Admin account

AWS also strongly recommends creating a separate AWS Administrator account for added security. This account will be used to create your site.

Make sure to download the CSV containing your login credentials and access/secret keys at the tail end of the process. And store them in a secure place!!

Create an S3 bucket

In this step we'll create an AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) bucket to host the HTML and other files used by our static site.

Grab the console login link from the CSV you downloaded when creating the administrator account.
Log into AWS using your Administrator account credentials.
Navigate to the S3 service.
Create an S3 bucket to store your site in the US East (N. Virginia) region. The bucket must have a unique name that has not already been created by another AWS user. For now, accept the default settings.

You should now have a private bucket that noone can view. You can test this by uploading a file and then trying to access it using the "Object URL" (this can be retrieved from the Overview tab after clicking on an uploaded file in the S3 console).

In the next step, we'll update the bucket's settings to serve as a public website.

Enable website hosting

Now that we have a bucket, it's time to enable it for website hosting. What follows is a distilled version of the process. See Configuring a bucket for website hosting for more details.

Enable website hosting for the bucket and enter the default names for the index and error pages.
Next, update the bucket permissions to enable public readability of files. This is a multi-step process:
- Navigate to Permissions -> Public access settings
- Click Edit in the right corner and uncheck the two boxes at bottom ("Block new public bucket policies" and "Block public and cross-account access...")
- Click Save
- Next, navigate to Permissions -> Bucket Policy
- Add the below bucket policy, replacing example.com with your own bucket name in the Resource section. You must use the precise bucket name (e.g. don't include ".com" if your bucket doesn't have ".com" in the name) and make sure to keep the trailing /* at the end.
```
{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "PublicReadGetObject",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Principal": "*",
            "Action": "s3:GetObject",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::example.com/*"
        }
    ]
}
```

Use the S3 web console for your bucket to upload a test HTML page called index.html:

  <!DOCTYPE html>
  <html>
      <body>
          <h1>Hello world!</h1>
          <p>Future home of an awesome project website.</p>
      </body>
  </html>

Check the public URL of the page to verify the content is accessible. This can be found by going back to where you configured static website hosting and grabbing the Endpoint link. The URL should follow the below format:
```
# Format
http://<bucket-name>.s3-website.<region>.amazonaws.com/

# Example
http://example.com.s3-website.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
```

See the website endpoints documentation for more details on how to access your public site.

Clean URLs

This type of setup has the added benefit of clean URLs -- i.e. the ability to use URLs
that end in a / -- when using index.html pages inside an S3 directory.

For example, http://example-bucket.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/somepath/ will automatically display the index.html inside of the somepath/ directory in your bucket.

En fin

Congratulations! You now have a static S3 website. Next, we'll add a custom domain and HTTPS to lend some polish to the site.