Terraform

Complete Guide to Hugo on AWS: From CI/CD to Production Infrastructure

Welcome to the complete guide for deploying Hugo sites on AWS! This comprehensive series covers everything from basic CI/CD automation to production-grade infrastructure with security, monitoring, and global distribution. Architecture Overview Our complete setup provides a robust, secure, and globally distributed static site hosting solution: What You’ll Learn This guide is structured as a progressive journey from basic automation to enterprise-grade infrastructure: Part 1: CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions Set up GitHub Actions for automated Hugo builds Configure AWS OIDC for secure, keyless authentication Deploy to S3 with proper IAM permissions Implement scheduled publishing with Hugo’s publishDate Part 2: Complete AWS Infrastructure Set up Route 53 for custom domain management Configure CloudFront for global content delivery Implement SSL/TLS with AWS Certificate Manager Advanced caching strategies and performance optimization Part 3: Security with AWS WAF Deploy AWS WAF for web application protection Configure rate limiting and DDoS protection Implement IP allowlists/blocklists Set up security monitoring and alerting Part 4: Monitoring and Operations CloudWatch dashboards and custom metrics Real User Monitoring (RUM) integration Automated health checks and alerting Performance optimization based on analytics Key Benefits This architecture provides:

Monday, August 25, 2025 Read

Part 1: CI/CD Pipeline with GitHub Actions

Building and deploying a static site with Hugo can be as simple as running a couple of commands on your local machine. But if you want to publish updates frequently, automate your workflow, and avoid the possibility of human error, a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is essential. In this first part of our comprehensive guide, we’ll set up GitHub Actions to automatically build and deploy your Hugo site to AWS S3 using Terraform for infrastructure management and AWS OIDC for secure, keyless authentication.

Monday, September 1, 2025 Read

Part 2: Complete AWS Infrastructure

In Part 1, we set up automated deployments to S3. While functional, your site is still missing crucial production features: a custom domain, SSL certificate, and global content delivery. In this part, we’ll complete the AWS infrastructure stack using Terraform to create a professional, high-performance hosting solution. This is Part 2 of our Complete Guide to Hugo on AWS. Make sure you’ve completed Part 1: CI/CD Pipeline first. Why CloudFront and Route 53? While you can serve a Hugo site directly from S3, using CloudFront and Route 53 provides significant benefits:

Monday, September 8, 2025 Read

Part 3: Security and WAF - Complete Hugo on AWS Guide

In Part 2, we set up a production-ready hosting infrastructure with CloudFront and Route 53. While CloudFront provides some built-in DDoS protection, adding AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) gives us granular control over traffic filtering, rate limiting, and protection against common web attacks. In this part, we’ll implement comprehensive security measures for your Hugo site. This is Part 3 of our Complete Guide to Hugo on AWS. Make sure you’ve completed Part 2: AWS Infrastructure first.

Monday, September 15, 2025 Read

Part 4: Monitoring and Operations - Complete Hugo on AWS Guide

In this final part of our Hugo on AWS series, we’ll implement comprehensive monitoring and operational excellence practices. After building your CI/CD pipeline, infrastructure, and security layer, it’s crucial to have visibility into your site’s performance, availability, and user experience. What We’ll Build By the end of this guide, you’ll have: 📊 CloudWatch Dashboards for infrastructure and application metrics 🔔 Intelligent Alerting for availability and performance issues 👥 Real User Monitoring to understand actual user experience 🏥 Automated Health Checks with multi-region monitoring ⚡ Performance Optimization based on data-driven insights 💰 Cost Monitoring and budget alerts Architecture Overview Step 1: CloudWatch Dashboards Infrastructure Monitoring Dashboard First, let’s create a comprehensive dashboard to monitor our infrastructure components.

Monday, September 22, 2025 Read

S3 Object Creation

Whoops Ever gone down that path of trying to be too smart for your own good? Yeah that happened to me this time. I want to start out by saying, I am not a frontend developer, so some of the “normal” things that they would expect are still beyond my knowledge. But the thing that really bit me in the butt may not have been the frontend code. So let me give you the backdrop here.

Tuesday, March 1, 2022 Read

Getting Started

Going over board So, for those that don’t know. I love Terraform . And when you are building your infrastructure it’s easy to take things too far. I am not sure if I did, but sure enough, the first place I started with Terraform was not actually the IaC that will be running any code. I started with building out the GitHub repo, and AWS IAM permissions with Terraform . And no, not the AWS IAM permissions to run the code either… I defined the AWS IAM permissions for GitHub to be able to plan and build the infrastructure. If you want to know more about what I am doing with that, feel free to look at GitHub Infrastructure.

Saturday, February 5, 2022 Read

Video Streamer GitHub Terraform

GitHub Terraform Thank you for your interest in the possible mundane of how I setup my repository for the video streamer. So how did I do it? It’s pretty straight forward. I started by defining the GitHub repository. I turned off most of the features as if those features are not on, I will be less likely to get distracted and playing with them. For example, I turned off the wiki for it since I would spend time keeping it up to date as I made small modifications during a time where the code will change a lot. And honestly, that’s what this blog will be for at this time. I can document what and why I am doing things so that I am not going into the detail of how or support with the wiki.

Saturday, February 5, 2022 Read