How to keep it cheapest on AWS Amplify? hosting Jekyll

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@AlfredoRamos

Is there a specific reason to use AWS Amplify?

It’s only curiosity, because you could host it for free (really free) using GitHub Pages, Netifly or even CloudFlare Pages, I’m not sure about this last one though.

HI @AlfredoRamos thanks a lot for your replies.

The reason to use AWS Amplify is that it has an easy GUI option to use authentication (username & password) on your whole ‘server’ (complete website locked and all included files). It uses Amazon Cognito behind the screens.

So I found AWS Amplify the preferred choice if you want some privacy on your files. Before that I was experimenting with GitHub Pages (not preferred, as your repository itself can not be private in free mode) and Netlify (I was using staticrypt to encrypt all HTML files with a password, which worked great, but if anyone knew the URL of the other non-HTML files on the server, they would be able to just get away with them … … the robots.txt could be bypassed to get the other files …so not really preferred for sensitive data you want password-protected. Also the HTML files could be downloaded locally and brute-force attacks would eventually reveal the password, theoretically).

So I am now using GitLab instead of GitHub. Since GitLab allows free users to have private repositories not accessible to the rest of the internet. And as explained, on top of that AWS Amplify to password-protect the actual complete website and files.

I haven’t looked much in to Heroku, Travis CI, I have no experience with them.

@AlfredoRamos

These kind of services (GitHub Actions, Travis CI, Nettifly, etc) give you a fresh VM each time it starts, however those services usually have a cache system, so even if you are running bundle install each time, those saved gems are used and updated as needed, so you do not consume a lot of build minutes.

Does it mean that the installed gems stay cached and accessible for the next build? Or does it also mean that the static files that were generate last time stay cached, and it is checked how much of a change, if any, each file has been updated/added/removed versus last build/push?

I am using GitHub Desktop to upload my whole Jekyll directory each time to AWS Amplify, so it only pushes those files which are updated, I believe. So, in my eyes, that seems efficient. However, in my understanding, if AWS Amplify would completely rebuild the whole website, even if only one or two files had been changed/pushed/updated via the previous GitHub Desktop step, it seems terribly inefficient.

Would you be able to give me some advice on how to only push/update the static website files on AWS Amplify whenever I make a new push (i.e. the site folder, I believe)? I am hoping it would stay cheaper.

• P.S. / aftertought: Perhaps this “only upload the site folder” road is no good? I don’t have enough understanding, but just now as a testing step, I copied my site folder locally, and I opened it in a web browser, and already several images were missing and links broken (missing local file path prepended), search is not finding any hits,… Perhaps the broken links have got something to do with @MichaelCurrin’s comment here:

@MichaelCurrin

Yes the code by author is wrong and you should fix it. Removing a forward slash on most URLs anywhere in the URL (ie beginning and middle and end) is very weird and not something that Jekyll sites do.

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@AlfredoRamos

Just install ImageMagick as the error says, similar to when you had to install it on your system.

In the mean time I will try this route.

@AlfredoRamos

You could install ImageMagic before running bundle install , so the installation of that gem can continue.

I haven’t used AWS Amplify, but I believe you can use yum or dnf to install ImageMagick.

In the mean time I will try this route. I find a lot of tutorials on the internet on how to install ImageMagick on AWS Lambda, but not on AWS Amplify. Strange. I hypothesize most people who want to customise stuff that far, might have the knowhow to use a generic EC2 instance on AWS, but I don’t have that far of a knowledge, so feel more comfortable with the WYSIWYG GUI AWS Amplify for now.