Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is a part of AWS that provides an API and a simple web interface to store and retrieve any type of data from anywhere on the web. An S3 bucket is conceptually similar to an API driven file folder.
One of the features of AWS S3 is that you can also use it to host static websites. The Semaphore blog, for example, is hosted on S3. Today, we’re happy to announce an integration which makes it easy to automatically build and deploy static websites as you push new versions to your Git repository. It works great for all other kinds of content too.
Similar to our continuous deployment integration with AWS Elastic Beanstalk, which we launched last week, our goal with S3 has also been to simplify the process as much as possible. Semaphore can detect your existing S3 buckets and also lets you create new ones, all without visiting the S3 web interface. There are also options to enter your custom site building commands and set the index page of your website. The brief screencast below shows this quick setup process.
You can tell Semaphore to automatically deploy your application from a selected branch whenever all tests pass, but you can also choose to do it manually yourself. At any time, your team will have a shared deployment history and uniform way to publish your website online.
If you don’t have any experience with static website engines, staticgen.com provides a good overview of the most popular options in various programming languages.
For more detailed help in getting started using our new feature, please see the related documentation page which explains the basics behind deploying to S3 and how to retrieve your AWS credentials.
We hope that the new Semaphore integration with Amazon S3 will help improve your continuous deployment workflow. Happy building!