There are times when you want to kick up a simple website without necessarily using the regular hosting offered by Hosting companies or spinning up a server on one of the cloud providers.
Hosting a static website using S3 bucket is already well documented. If you have the domain registered on AWS Route53 then even better because you can use Route53 alias for AName to ensure your root domain and any subdomain, like www, all point to the same resources.
http://example.com -> Homepage http://www.example.com -> Homepage
Below I will describe the steps to create a static website using Node/Express and host it on Heroku add a custom domain on Heroku and use S3 static hosting to redirect the root domain to the custom domain (subdomain) pointing at the Heroku app.
Create a GitHub repository Clone the application to your local machine
Create an ExpressJS application
>$ express examplesite --git -e
Create an app on Heroku * Go to the deploy and tab and choose Github as your deployment method * Choose the repository you want to deploy * Choose the branch (default master) you want to deploy
Push your changes to GitHub
This will trigger an auto build on Heroku
Use heroku cli tool and the command below to view the logs:
>$ heroku logs --tail --app examplesite
Register a domain on Route53
Go to the setting tab in Heroku
* Click on Add Domain
* Or use the command below:
>$ heroku domains:add www.examplesite.com --app examplesite
View your added domain and the Heroku DNS target
Go to the Route53 dashboard and add the CName record to the domain Create Record Set Name: www.examplesite.com Type: CName Value: Heroku DNS target Alias: No
To redirect requests for examplesite.com to www.examplesite.com, you could use S3 Static Website Hosting and the Redirect Requests option.
In this case, you would create a bucket named examplesite.com, and in the Properties for the bucket, enable Static Website Hosting, then select Redirect Requests, and set the Target Bucket or Domain to www.example.com. Be sure to record the Endpoint URL. For example, if you created your bucket in us-west-2 the endpoint would be examplesite.com.static-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com.
Next in Route53, Open the zone for example.com, and create a Record Set. Create Record Set Name: examplesite.com Type: A - IPv4 address Alias: Yes Alias Target: s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com