🚀 Fast Static Site Deployment on AWS with Pulumi YAML

Posted on by


This is a submission for the Pulumi Deploy and Document Challenge: Fast Static Website Deployment



What I Built

I built a fast, responsive, and lightweight static documentation site powered by Docsify, hosted on AWS S3 with a CloudFront CDN for global distribution. The entire infrastructure is managed using Pulumi YAML, allowing me to declaratively define and deploy resources without writing any imperative code.

This setup is perfect for:

  • Personal documentation sites
  • Open-source project documentation
  • Simple landing pages or portfolios



Demo

🎥 YouTube walkthrough: Coming Soon!



Project Repo

🔗 GitHub: MakendranG/docsify-on-aws

The repository includes:

  • ✅ Pulumi YAML configuration for AWS S3 & CloudFront
  • ✅ index.html with Docsify integration
  • ✅ A step-by-step README.md to reproduce the deployment



My Journey

I wanted to explore Pulumi’s YAML capabilities by deploying a real-world use case—serving a documentation site. I chose Docsify because it’s simple and doesn’t require a build step.



Key Steps:

  1. Repo Setup: I initialized a GitHub repo with a www/ folder containing my index.html and static assets.
  2. Pulumi Init: Initialized a new Pulumi project with YAML runtime.
  3. AWS Infra: Defined an S3 bucket, website configuration, ownership and access settings, and CloudFront distribution.
  4. Fixing Errors: Faced YAML struct issues and permission errors (like PutBucketPolicy), resolved by tweaking the IAM policy and ensuring public access configs.
  5. Deployment: Once configured correctly, everything deployed smoothly via pulumi up.



Using Pulumi

Pulumi helped streamline the whole process:

  • Declarative YAML made infrastructure as code very beginner-friendly.
  • Pulumi CLI gave visibility with preview, diff, and up actions.
  • I used Pulumi Copilot and Docs to troubleshoot resource schema mismatches.



Notable Resources Used:

  • aws:s3:BucketV2
  • aws:s3:BucketWebsiteConfigurationV2
  • aws:s3:BucketPolicy
  • aws:cloudfront:Distribution
  • synced-folder:index:S3BucketFolder

💡 Pulumi Copilot Prompt Example:

“How do I configure BucketWebsiteConfigurationV2 with index and error document in YAML?”

Image description

Thanks for reading! Feel free to fork the repo and launch your own docs site. The deployment takes less than 5 minutes! ⚡



Source link