Hugo to AWS S3 Publishing Workflow

By Harley Stagner

After many years of dealing with dynamic, database-driven websites, I have decided to move my professional website to a static site using the Hugo static site generator. In the process, I wanted to simplify my hosting and design philosophy for this site. I decided on two requirements.

  1. I want the site to be hosted as a static site from cloud storage (AWS S3 for now).
  2. I want the name resolution (DNS) and Content Distribution (CDN) to be handled by a third-party (Cloudflare for now). This will make it easier to move my website to another cloud provider should I need to do so in the future.

With these two requirements in mind, I set out to make my new site. With a static site, all I really need to do is configure the S3 storage for static website hosting and upload the files. However, I want to version control my files with git and automate the process of sending them to S3. Let’s take a look at the publishing workflow.

My Hugo Publishing Workflow

Hugo Publishing Workflow
Hugo Publishing Workflow

  1. Write the post or webpage using a markdown editor. Sometimes this is Obsidian and sometimes this is iA Writer depending on what I am posting.
  2. Preview the post and if I like it, I commit the changes to my local git repository and then tell Hugo to build the site.
  3. Push the changes to my remote GitHub repository.
  4. A GitHub action is used to then upload the “public” folder for my website to an Amazon S3 Bucket.
  5. Now my new post or webpage is in my S3 bucket.
  6. The public can access my website over the internet. (* Note in the diagram that DNS and CDN is provided by Cloudflare so I can move my website to another cloud provider should I need to in the future.)

Now I have a fast, reliable, static website that can easily be changed or added to using plain-text markdown.