Middleman and AWS CLI S3 Sync

The aws cli allows a command line interface with your Amazon services. I've recently integrated the aws cli with my middleman site for syncing changes to my S3 bucket. Here is how I did it.

Install aws cli

See the getting started guide.

Store your credentials in a profile file

Create the AWS config file for storing your keys

$ mkdir ~/.aws/
$ touch ~/.aws/config

Add the default profile. The default profile is used when you use aws without specifying a profile.

[default]
aws_access_key_id=AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
aws_secret_access_key=AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
region=us-east-1

Add a custom profile, if you like, to the config file ~/.aws/config. Honestly, I'm not sure why I use a custom profile. I think it seemed like a good idea when I first set up aws :).

[profile luk3]
aws_access_key_id=AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
aws_secret_access_key=AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
region=us-east-1

Sync everything to S3

For this blog I store the aws command in a Makefile.

deploy:
    @bundle exec middleman build
    @aws --profile=luk3 s3 sync build/ s3://luk3thomas.com/ --acl=public-read --delete --cache-control="max-age=1576800000" --exclude "*.html"
    @aws --profile=luk3 s3 sync build/ s3://luk3thomas.com/ --acl=public-read --delete --cache-control="max-age=0, no-cache" --exclude "*" --include "*.html"
  1. aws --profile=luk3 uses the profile luk3 in the ~/.aws/config.
  2. sync command only syncs the changes since the last upload.
  3. build/ is the target directory where the static HTML files live.
  4. s3://luk3thomas.com/ is my bucket.
  5. --acl=public-read makes the files viewable by everyone. See the manual for other options.
  6. --delete deleles any files from S3 that are not found in the build/ directory.
  7. --cache-control="max-age=0, no-cache" sets the cache expiration. I don't want the browser caching my static pages.
  8. --exclude "*" exludes all files. The exclude option is used in conjunction with the --include option “*.html”.
  9. --include "*.html" includes all the HTML files.

For more information on the sync command, read the manual.