Jekyll On AWS Amplify

Here I am, changing the hosting / backend / whatever on this blog again. This time, I'm going with AWS Amplify. It will let me do continuous integration (automatically publish) using just GitHub connected to AWS Amplify. Amplify recognizes Jekyll sites, and builds and deploys them automatically, so the setup is fairly trivial. I already do all of my domain registration through AWS Route 53 so my setup is really simple. The only thing I haven't got a good solution for is hosting external media (aka images). That may be the place I look next to better automate the creation / distribution of content.

Incidentally, Forestry.io was an ok solution, but I prefer using the command line and text editors to create and edit content. On top of that, I forgot I was even using Forestry.io and after a year of no posts, went straight to Git anyway. I'm probably not in the majority on this, so take anything I have to suggest with a grain of salt...

Things to Note:

  • The minima (and probably other stuff) requires the environment variable JEKYLL_ENV to be set to production for some of the functionality to render - notably Google Analytics and Disqus. This is easily done in the Amplify Console

Amazon Amplify Jekyll environment variable