AWS Lambda Static Site Generator Plugins

starting with Hugo!

A week ago, I presented a CloudFormation template for an AWS Git-backed Static Website stack. If you are not familiar with it, please click through and review the features of this complete Git

  • static website CloudFormation stack.

This weekend, I extended the stack to support a plugin architecture to run the static site generator of your choosing against your CodeCommit Git repository content. You specify the AWS Lambda function at stack launch time using CloudFormation parameters (ZIP location in S3).

The first serious static site generator plugin is for Hugo, but others can be added with or without my involvement and used with the same unmodified CloudFormation template.

The Git-backed static website stack automatically invokes the static site generator whenever the site source is updated in the CodeCommit Git repository. It then syncs the generated static website content to the S3 bucket where the stack serves it over a CDN using https with DNS served by Route 53.

I have written three AWS Lambda static site generator plugins to demonstrate the concept and to serve as templates for new plugins:

  1. Identity transformation plugin - This copies the entire Git repository content to the static website with no modifications. This is currently the default plugin for the static website CloudFormation template.

  2. Subdirectory plugin - This plugin is useful if your Git repository has files that should not be included as part of the static site. It publishes a specified subdirectory (e.g., “htdocs” or “public-html”) as the static website, keeping the rest of your repository private.

  3. Hugo plugin - This plugin runs the popular Hugo static site generator. The Git repository should include all source templates, content, theme, and config.

You are welcome to use any of these plugins when running an AWS Git-backed Static Website stack. The documentation in each of the above plugin repositories describes how to set the CloudFormation template parameters on stack create.

You may also write your own AWS Lambda function static site generator plugin using one of the above as a starting point. Let me know if you write plugins; I may add new ones to the list above.

The sample AWS Lambda handler plugin code takes care of downloading the source, and uploading the resulting site and can be copied as is. All you have to do is fill in the “generate_static_site” code to generate the site from the source.

The plugin code for Hugo is basically this:

def generate_static_site(source_dir, site_dir, user_parameters):
    command = ["./hugo", "--source=" + source_dir, "--destination=" + site_dir]
    if user_parameters.startswith("-"):
        command.extend(shlex.split(user_parameters))
    print(subprocess.check_output(command, stderr=subprocess.STDOUT))

I have provided build scripts so that you can build the sample AWS Lambda functions yourself, because you shoudn’t trust other people’s blackbox code if you can help it. That said, I have also made it easy to use pre-built AWS Lambda function ZIP files to try this out.

These CloudFormation template and AWS Lambda functions are very new and somewhat experimental. Please let me know where you run into issues using them and I’ll update documentation. I also welcome pull requests, especially if you work with me in advance to make sure the proposed changes fit the vision for this stack.