This tutorial assumes you’ve already got an Amazon Web Services account.
Go to Services and search for or select S3.
Select the S3 service
Click Create Bucket.
Select create bucket
Enter a name for your bucket, this must be unique. For instance bobs-cool-hosting.
Give your bucket and a name and select a region
Select a region to host your bucket in. This will be geographically where your files are served from. It’s best to choose a location close to where your users visit from. Click Next.
The options can be left default, just click Next.
Options can be left default
Permissions set up is important. By default AWS S3 sets the bucket up to be secure and prevent it from being made publicly accessible. This is due to so many people just setting up buckets and accidentally or carelessly making them public, resulting security breaches. We want our bucket to be public because we’re hosting a website, so uncheck all the Public access settings and click Next.
Permissions settings
On the Review page you may be warned that this bucket may become public, that’s ok as we said so click Create bucket.
Review page
So we’ve now created our bucket, as you can see here it’s marked “Objects can be public“. Click on the name of the bucket to open it.
List of buckets
Click the Properties tab, then click Static website hosting.
Select static website hosting
Click the option Use this bucket to host a website. Take note of the URL at the top, this will be used to access our website. Type in index.html as the index document and error.html as the error document. Click Save.
Configure static website hosting
If you now go to the URL we saw you’ll see it’s still saying 403 Forbidden. We now need to set up it’s permissions to enable public access.
By default access is prevented
Click on the Permissions tab, then Bucket Policy. Copy in the following policy, being sure to change the bucket name in the Resource field from “my-serverless-wp” to match the name of your bucket. Click Save.
Now create a test.html file with just a bit of text in it. On the Overview tab click Upload.
Select Upload
Click Add File and Select the file you created and then click Next.
Select files to upload
Uploading files
Under Manage public permissions select Grant public read access to this object(s). Click Next.
Set object to public
On the Set properties page the standard Storage Class is fine for this, click Next.
Default properties are fine
Click Upload, our file will then be displayed in the list.
Upload files
File shown in list
Go to the bucket url from step 10, enter this in a browser and add at the end “/test.html”. You should see your test.html page displayed.
Test page is now displayed
Your S3 bucket is now ready to serve your website, but you’ll probably want to set up a DNS CNAME to give it a friendly domain name. I’ll explain how to do that in another article.
Here’s how I run my site(davidfindlay.com.au) in a sort of serverless way using Amazon S3. I say it’s sort of serverless because you still need an Apache/MySQL/WordPress installation, but it doesn’t need to be running all the time and can just run on your local computer.
Why host your WordPress site on Amazon S3?
Firstly S3 is very fast. WordPress hosted on LAMP has to bootstrap WordPress, talk to the database, process your request and generate a page before sending it to the browser. This all takes time. It makes sense if you host dynamic content. However if your content doesn’t change much, it doesn’t.
If you update your site maybe once a day, why have the HTML generated every time a visitor hits the site? With Static WordPress hosting you generate the HTML once when you make a change and the generated HTML is then served to each new visitor. This is much faster.
As mentioned S3 is very fast, but it’s also scalable. If your site suddenly gets visited by 10000 people in an hour, S3 can handle it. Your typical WordPress installation on a LAMP hosting provider probably can’t.
Secondly static hosting is more secure. Because your WordPress installation is hidden behind a firewall on your local network, you don’t have to worry about security updates and zero-day exploits as much. Sure you still should keep up to date, but because attackers don’t have any access to the PHP pages or database you’re kept much safer. Amazon has good security measures on S3 and as long as you use them, your S3 should be kept safe.
Assumed Knowledge
Basic set up and installation of WordPress and WordPress plugins
Using hosting software such as MAMP or a LAMP server or Docker
Working at the command line
Step 1: WordPress installation
Firstly install WordPress locally. Perhaps using MAMP or on an Apache/MySQL/PHP installation on a linux box on your local network. How you do this part is up to you. I’ve actually got mine running on a small EC2 micro instance, that I just turn on and off when I want to make changes to my site.
No one will actually visit this WordPress installation, so it can just be local on your machine, not world accessible via the internet. Firewall it off so no one can reach it for maximum safety.
This is pretty much a standard WordPress plugin install, so I want explain it too much.
The Simply Static plugin automatically generates a plain html version of your site and exports it to a directory on your WordPress host.
Static means that it’s plain HTML, no PHP. It can run on any sort of hosting without needing a PHP or MySQL installation.
Once Simply Static is installed, activate it.
Select Simply Static, then Settings from the left hand menu.
Set Destination URLs to Use Relative URLs.
Simply Static settings
Set Delivery Method to Local Directory.
Simply Static settings, continued
Set Local Directory to a suitable location, for instance on my linux installation “/var/www/html_static”. Take note of this path as you may need to modify the script in Step 4 to match.
Step 4: Configure AWS IAMs user and AWS CLI
You’ll need an AWS IAM account set up to use the AWS CLI.
Click Services at the top of the screen and in the search box type IAM. Click on the IAM option that appears in the drop down.
Click Add User.
Add IAM user
Enter a user name such as “s3hosting”. Under Access Type, select Programmatic access. This is required so that the AWS CLI can use the user credentials. Click Next.
Set up programmatic access
Under Set Permissions, select Attach existing policies directly, then search for s3. Select the AmazonS3FullAccess policy. Click Next. Note that this policy means that using this AWS Access Key ID and Secret Key, someone could access any file in any bucket on your AWS account. This can be dangerous!
Select existing policy
Continue through to the review page with default settings. The review page should look like this. Click Create User.
Review and create user
You’ve now created the AWS CLI user. You’ll need the Access key ID and Secret access key displayed on this page for the next part of the process.
Note access key id and secret key
Next move back to your terminal where you’ve installed your WordPress.
Run the AWS Configure command. You’ll need to supply user IAM user Key ID and Secret Key as well as the default region, which should be the region that your S3 bucket is in:
aws configure
Configure AWS CLI
Create the following bash script and call it syncStatic.sh:
Change ‘my-serverless-wp’ to match the name of your bucket and you may need to change ‘/var/www/html_static’ to match the local directory you set in Step 3.
Step 5: Generate Static HTML
In the WordPress Admin pages, select Simply Static from the side menu. Click Generate.
The log will show progress as the static html pages are generated. When the log shows “Done!” move to the next step.
Step 6: Sync to S3
In your terminal, run the syncStatic.sh script. It’ll quickly transfer the files to S3. If you’re running in a small EC2 instance this will be super quick, but a bit slower otherwise.
Step 7: Test the site
Go to your S3 public endpoint URL in your browser. For instance: http://my-serverless-wp.s3-website-ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com/
You can get your URL from the S3 bucket configuration by going to Services->S3->Select your bucket->Properties->Static Web Hosting:
Static website hosting url
After clicking on that URL or pasting it in your browser, you should be able to see your WordPress site and browse it.
Step 8: Set up DNS CNAME
Your site is now on the web, but it’s on an ugly Amazon AWS S3 url. You don’t want to direct people to that.
The next step depends on how you want to host your site. You’ll need to set up CNAME(canonical name) which points your website domain to the the AWS S3 bucket address.
I’ll show how to do this for Amazon Route 53 DNS hosting in another article.
I use Docker for development projects as it gives me a clean development environment where I can have all my dependancies isolated from other projects and stuff running on my system.
Disclaimer: this may not be the best way to do Django and Angular in Docker. I chose this method because I wanted to have my Angular app served by Django to avoid CORS problems and just keep the architecture as close to what it’ll be in production as possible. Obviously it wouldn’t be running on Django’s runserver in production however.
Here’s how to build a docker configuration to run my Django frontend and Angular backend together in the one container.
This docker-compose file first creates a postgresql database container and then a web container using a Dockerfile. When the container is started it runs the devservers.sh script we created in Part 2.
It mounts the current directory(the django root) to /code within the container. It then exposes port 8000 inside the container to port 8000 outside the container.
In the Dockerfile put:
FROM python:3
ENV PYTHONUNBUFFERED 1
RUN mkdir /code
RUN curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup_10.x | bash -
RUN apt install nodejs
WORKDIR /code
ADD requirements.txt /code/
RUN pip install -r requirements.txt
ADD . /code/
RUN mkdir -p /code/static
WORKDIR /code/frontend
RUN npm install -g @angular/cli
RUN npm install
RUN ng build --outputPath=/code/static
This creates a new Docker container from the Python 3 official image. It creates a /code directory in the container.
It then installs node.js as as dependancy for the Angular CLI and installs all the Django project dependancies from the requirements.txt file.
Finally to test that the environment is ready it copies in the code from the Django root, installs the Angular CLI globally, installs the Angular project dependancies and does a test build of them.
Note that in the docker-compose, we’re telling it to mount the current working directory as a volume on /code. So the /code path in the container will be replaced with the Django root from the host system.
Really this means that the lines from ADD onwards in the Dockerfile are unnecessary. However I’ve left them in there to just ensure that that we know about it at image build time if the environment won’t be ready to use.
Using the Docker environment
To start the dev servers run the following command in the Django project root:
docker-compose up -d
As your Django project root is mounted in the Docker container, any changes you make to the Django/Angular project will also be in /code in the Docker container. The Django manage.py runserver will automatically detect any changes on the Django side and recompile and serve them.
Angular build watch will detect changes to the Angular code in <Django project root>/frontend and rebuild them, putting the output SPA into /code/static where it’s served by Django’s static file serving.
If you add new files or npm dependancies to the Angular project, you’ll need to restart the web container using:
docker-compose restart web
If you add new dependancies to the Django project do a full rebuild with:
docker-compose up --build -d
In my case I actually run my dev install on a different machine than the one I write code on, so I just upload via Webstorm or PyCharm to the project root on my dev server. The changes are detected and ready to use within seconds.
I’ve been working on a project that uses Angular on the frontend and Django REST Framework on the backend. Both Django and Angular have their own development servers that feature auto-recompile on change, which is really handy.
I wanted to have the Angular app served by Django to avoid Cross Origin Request Validation(CORS) and because Django is handling uploaded files. There are other ways to deal with this in development but this is one way to do it.
The development project is structured in such a way that the frontend angular source root is a sub-directory of the Django project root.
django_root/
manage.py
... rest of django stuff ...
frontend/
angular.json
... rest of angular stuff ...
static/
See my article on How to Serve an Angular SPA in Django for the details of how to configure Django to serve the Angular application
I created a shell script to start the two dev servers and called it devservers.sh:
Note: “/code/” may need to be changed to reflect the path to your django project root. In my case I’m serving this is Docker and installing the Django root in /code.
When the script runs it first makes the Django database migrations, loads them into the database server then runs it’s dev server on port 8000. It then makes sure the static files path has been created, installs any angular dependancies and build watches the angular code.
Note instead of “ng run” I’m using “ng build –watch”. This watches the angular source code path like the ng run command and automatically builds source when it changes. However instead of serving it on port 4200, ng build deploys the compiled SPA to the outputPath, in this case /code/static/.
Put the devservers.sh script in the django root and run it. It’ll first start up Django and then Angular. Angular will take a minute or so to start up before you can access it.
You’ll only need to stop and restart the devservers.sh script when new files(or dependancies) are added to the Angular app. This is because the ng build option only looks at changes in existing files, it doesn’t detect new files.
In the next part I’ll show you how to put this all in a Docker container which is useful for keeping a clean development environment.
I’ve been working on a blog/gallery web application that has is using Django to provide a RESTful backend API and has an Angular 6 front end client side. In doing this I wanted to have the Angular single page application served by the Django server. Configuring this was a little complicated as there was no clear complete explanation.
When deploying your web application, create a “static” directory under the Django project base. Use “ng build” to build your Angular web application, then copy everything from the “dist/<your_angular_app>/” directory to the “static” directory in Angular.
After starting the Django server:
python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000
you should see your Angular SPA start up and run at http://<server>:<port>/. You’ll also be able to access the application via http://<server>:<port>/static/, however all the urls in there will reference /, so it’s best to use the root url.
In the next part I’ll show you how to get the two dev servers running together to autobuild both Django and Angular while having the Angular SPA served by Django.
Deploying thousands of small files via SCP to a server takes an inordinately long time, even via a very fast network, much longer than transferring one large file. Here’s a tutorial on my Gitlab CI setup for compressing all my deployment files into one large tarball, transferring it to to the server then uncompressing it there.
I have been experimenting with GitLab CI/CD for use with my Swimming Management System projects for Masters Swimming Queensland. It’s a legacy project that I’m now gradually transitioning to modern standards. I’ve set up a Pipeline that will allow me to test commits in PHPUnit, then have them automatically deploy to a dev/test server.
The project now uses both Composer and with some Angular modules it also uses NPM. In the build phase on GitLab CI, composer install is run to get the dependancies into the vendor directory.
To do it this way, you’ll need to have shell access via ssh to your server.
I’ve set up the test server deployment details and authentication credentials as in GitLab Variables:
Configuration of GitLab CI/CD Variables
In the deploy stage I’ve added the following code prior to upload via scp:
In this case, the target ‘.’ indicates that we are tarballing the current directory.
In the second line we create a file that contains the definition of an environment variable on the target server, which is set to the GitLab CI variable TEST_SSHPATH. TEST_SSHPATH contains the path to the root of my code deployment on the server.
Finally, we then scp this file to the target server, putting it in ~/.ssh/environment. This will mean that when we ssh into the server, that environment variable will be available to us, containing the value from the GitLab CI variable.
Now we can transfer the build.tar.gz file and un-tar it.
The first line in this block does the transfer via scp, to our the path provided in the variable TEST_SSHPATH.
The second line, connects via ssh , changes directory to the code deployment path, then extracts the build files. Tar -zxvf removes the .tar.gz file after it’s done, so there’s no need to seperately delete it.
Before making this change, my swimman project would take 16:30 to build and install. With this change it’s down to 4:35. That’s a saving of 12 minutes which makes a big difference when deploying a quick fix to the test environment.
In late February 2018 we took our young family(2 3/4 years and 7 month old) to Tasmania to visit my Grandmother who lives in Pontypool on the East Coast of Tasmania. This blog post has a short listing of what we did and tips for doing a similar trip with young children.
Parking
Having two young children meant getting a lift to the airport wouldn’t really work for us. Also as we needed our pram and car seats in Tasmania, the AirTrain wouldn’t work either. So we decided to use an airport parking service. As it turned out there was a special on the Brisbane Airport ParkValet service.
This option was fantastic for us. We were able to drive straight in and had plenty of space to unload the car seats and luggage from the car. There was also a concierge option that we probably would have taken, but it was only offered when we first booked and we couldn’t add it later. We didn’t really need it in the end though.
All our luggage and car seats unloaded at Brisbane Airport ParkValet
The Flight to Hobart
Our flights were on Virgin Australia, who helpfully let you take any baby related stuff on your flight without any excess baggage charges. We needed to book a seat for Lily as she is over 2, but Jasmine rode in Jacqui’s lap.
We got to board the plane first, with passengers who had special needs. This gave us time to get the kids on board, carry-on stowed away and everyone settled. Jasmine had a special infant seatbelt that attached on to Jacqui’s. She didn’t much like being strapped in and tried to squirm out as much as possible.
On the way down Lily sat between us and I(David) sat by the window. Lily is prone to being very upset by loud noises such as motorbikes. However she was actually excited by the take off and wasn’t upset at all. We didn’t have any ear problems on the ascent either.
David, Lily, Jacqui and Jasmine on our flight to Hobart
We were able to keep Lily amused with toys, colouring-in and for a short while the iPhone. She was a bit annoyed that she couldn’t access Netflix or ABC iView and didn’t like anything on Virgin’s entertain app.
On descent Lily did get quite upset which we believe was due to pain in her ears. We did try a few things to get her to equalise the pressure but she wasn’t able to understand. She didn’t settle until just before landing.
Arrival
On arrival we waited until everyone else was off the plane to get out, so we could pick up all the lost toys from under our seats. On the tarmac we saw a business jet from the USA that had been equipped with weather research equipment for the SOCRATES project, studying the interactions between clouds and particles naturally produced by the ocean, such as sea salt and biogenic particles.
National Center for Atmospheric Research aircraft at Hobart Airport
When we walked into the terminal we were right in front of the Melbourne Demons AFL team arriving from Melbourne, so there was a WIN TV crew filming us. We were told that Jacqui and Jasmine appeared in the preview and sports news item about it.
The Hobart terminal arrivals area is quite small so there was a massive crowd around the baggage carousel when I got there. I managed to find a spot near the end and was surprised that the pram and car seats which were taken in oversize luggage in Brisbane came out on the carousel.
By the time I’d come back Lily had made a friend in the waiting area. The game had become that their daughter would give Lily a lolly, she’d give it to Mum because she didn’t like it, then Jacqui would pass it back to the little girl’s brother. This went on for some time while I organised the hire car pick up.
Lily made a friend in the terminal
Hire car pick up was a tag team effort as Jacqui and I swapped duties watching the luggage and filling out paperwork at the Hertz desk. Eventually we were all sorted and we left the terminal. The little girl Lily had befriended was quite upset by this.
Hire Car
We thought we’d be smart and hire a larger vehicle for our trip. We’d had a struggle fitting our luggage into our Corolla, with one suitcase having to go in the back seat and the other blocking access to the pram in the boot.
We hired a medium sized SUV, listed on Hertz as a Nissan Qashqai or similar. We ended up with a Mitsubishi ASX. Immediately I noted a problem. There was no way to fit a pram and suitcases in the boot. In fact all it would fit was a pram. Even if we removed the rear parcel shelf cover there’d still be not enough space to fit them and it’d be dangerous without a cargo barrier.
So it turns out a Toyota Corolla sedan actually has more cargo space than a medium SUV Mitsubishi ASX.
It took quite some time to get the car seats installed and adjusted. This was complicated by light rain at the time. One frustrating thing I found was that after I’d installed Lily’s car seat, the rear seatbelt was looped in the wrong place. So I had to try to move the seat forward without completely removing the car seat. After what seemed like forever and several escape attempts by Lily, we got in the car and headed off to go up the East Coast to Grandma’s place.
Today’s cutesy viral video is from the UK where a mother was being interviewed on TV with her two children. The younger toddler runs around the studio, climbing up on the desk and everyone ignores it. In fact everyone laughs and thinks it was cute!
As the father of two children under 3 I find this behaviour absolutely disgusting. Not the toddler’s behaviour, I know toddlers sometimes do run amok even with the best discipline and training.
The problem I have with this is everyone’s reaction, especially the mother’s. It’s not okay to ignore such terrible behaviour in public. It’s not funny, it’s not cute, it’s unacceptable.
You see this in public places every day. Parents are standing in the queue for a bank teller for instance, meanwhile their kids are terrorising the whole bank, climbing on chairs and counters, drawing all over forms and making too much noise. Usually the parents are completely oblivious to their little brats anti-social behaviour.
Children must be taught that there are times where they must stand still and quiet with their parents. On several occasions I stood at the swimming pool holding my daughter’s hand while she pulled and screamed as we waited for her mother to get changed. She just wanted to run around and play.
However after consistently making her stand still and asking her to be quiet, now when I do this she does stand still with me and remain mostly quiet while waiting. She’ll also sit with me in a chair quietly and wait for long periods of time. Sure I often have to remind her to sit still and quiet, but she will do it most of the time. Yes she tries to test the boundaries, but with constant reinforcement it’s possible to keep her behaving.
Courteous behaviour in public, respect for other people and their property and waiting are all major life skills that children need to learn. We do nothing to help them learn those skills by laughing at or calling it cute when they misbehave.
My wife recently purchased a new iPhone 7. We backed up her old iPhone to iCloud, then proceeded to start up her new iPhone, selecting the Restore from iCloud Backup option. We then hit a snag.
I had enabled 2 Factor Authentication for iCloud access. This meant to be able to access her iCloud account from the new phone, she needed to provide a code that would be SMS’d to her iPhone. However has her number had been transferred to the SIM card in the new iPhone, this meant the SMS would go to the new iPhone, the one we were trying to set up. Because we were still trying to set it up, we couldn’t see the code. We also didn’t have any other phone we could put that SIM card in.
The only other option would have been to recover the iCloud account via an alternate method., which takes several days. Not what we wanted to do.
After much frustration and a phone call to AppleCare, it turned out the solution is simple:
Select the Resend Verification option
The initial SMS was hidden and didn’t automatically advance us through the process, but tapping the option to resend the code enabled us to continue forward. We still didn’t see the message, but the phone automatically recognised it had been sent the verification code and allowed us to continue to restore the new phone from the iCloud backup.
I also mentioned there are other better tools you can use for Keyword Research if you want to go to the next level. Here’s the tool I was referring to:
Long Tail Pro(affiliate link) – I have used a trial version and it seemed pretty good. I don’t use it right now as I’m not actively building new sites.
I’ll link to the presentation replay once it’s posted.