webflow-aws

An out-of-the box tool written in Python to deploy your Webflow static website on AWS with a serverless architecture.

This tool uses the power of Cloud Formation to let you have your website up in minutes, with CDN and SSL Certificate enabled.

You can manage up to an infinite number of websites in the same AWS account, paying only for the real traffic. That's the beautiful part of serverless 😉

Getting Started

Prerequisites

In order to use this tool, you need to have:

• Access to an Active AWS account with all required permissions
• NodeJS 10.3.0 or later installed (instructions).
• Python 3.6 or later with pip3 installed (instructions)
• AWS CLI installed and configured (instructions).

Finally, install the AWS CDK command line tool with the following command

npm install -g aws-cdk

Installation

You can download and install the latest version of this tool from the Python package index (Pypi) as follows:

pip3 install webflow-aws

Advanced Installation

This section explains how build and install the Python package using the source code.

Clone repo & build your package

To use our tool, you have to clone this repository and install:

• Clone using HTTPs:

  git clone https://github.com/odfdata/webflow-aws.git

• Clone using SSH:

  git clone git@github.com:odfdata/webflow-aws.git 

After you cloned the repository, go inside the webflow-aws folder and generate the .whl package to be installed.

cd webflow-aws
python3 setup.py sdist bdist_wheel

Install the package

The build file (generate above) will be visible in the dist/ folder. You will have a wheel and tar.gz file. If you previously installed another version of webflow-aws, it's recommended to uninstall it running the following command:

pip3 uninstall dist/webflow_aws-{version}-py3-none-any.whl

Now you're ready to install the package inside the dist/folder. Without renaming them, you can install our tool on any computer with the following command

pip3 install dist/webflow_aws-{version}-py3-none-any.whl

You can find the {version} inside the setup.py file.

Check if everything is working

At this point, on your target machine, you will be able to use the tool by typing webflow-aws from any folder. To see the available commands, and check if it's correctly installed, run the following command

webflow-aws --help

Migration from v1 to v2

If you used the v1 version of the tool and you plan to migrate to the v2, remember this:

To migrate from v1 to v2, you have to delete the current deployed website from the AWS Console. Unfortunately is not possible to do it using our tool since there are resources that are running at edge and it takes time to complete the deletion on AWS side.

These are the steps to delete your current website:

• Open the configuration file you have locally (named webflow-aws-config.yaml), and search for the keywords
• stack_name and bucket_name and copy the values.
• Go to AWS Console and login in the account you have deployed your website.
• Search for the AWS service named S3 and open it.
• Search for the Bucket with the same name copied before and click on the circle on the left of the name.
• Click on the Empty button, and now you are ready to click on Delete button
• Search for the AWS service named CloudFormation and open it.
• Search for the stack deployed, click on it and click on Delete
• After a couple of minutes, you will see the status stack equal to DELETE_FAILED
• You can now click on Delete again, and check the square on the left of the resource name
• Now you can click on Delete stack, and you are ready to upgrade your local tool.

Update from v1 to v2

Run the following command to update the tool:

pip3 install --upgrade webflow-aws

Now you are ready to deploy your website using the new version running:

webflow-aws publish

Deploy your website

You are now ready to deploy your website. Start by going to Webflow and download your created website as a .zip file (click here to see a detailed guide on how to do it).

Once you downloaded it, create a folder and put the .zip file inside. The folder's name does not matter, but make it meaningful for you. In our guide we will use the example-website folder

Set up DNS record

Once your website is deployed, you will need a DNS Record to point to the file location. With webflow-aws you can do that in two ways:

• create a hosted zone inside Route53 (guide) on the AWS account you're using to deploy the website. In this scenario webflow-aws automatically manages the creation of all needed configuration, both for DNS Records and for SSL Certificate verification.
• [beta] use a custom DNS manager, such as GoDaddy or your domain registrant. In this scenario, do not configure Route 53 properties and, once website is published, instructions with CNAMEs to set will be shown to you, so that you can manually configure them. Moreover, during first website deployment, you will need to publish a TXT record to verify your SSL Certificate.

With webflow-aws you can have one or more subdomain point at your website, such as example.com and www.example.com.

In the webflow-aws-config.yaml file you will need to set the list of domains you would like to have your website pointing at. For example, you can have example.com and www.example.com enabled.

Create webflow-aws-config.yaml file

The webflow-aws-config.yaml file allows you to customize the website you want to publish online. To create it, you have to run this command:

webflow-aws create-config

It will guide you through the creation of the configuration. At the end of this procedure, you will see the webflow-aws-config.yaml in your current directory.

Advanced creation

If you want to create the configuration file on your own, this is an example file you can customize:

# REQUIRED parameters
bucket_name: "www.example.com"
domain_name: "example.com"
CNAMEs:
  - "www.example.com"
route_53_hosted_zone_id: "Z05234556KK8DIAQM"
route_53_hosted_zone_name: "example.com"
stack_name: "WwwExampleComStack"

# OPTIONAL parameters
aws_profile_name: "default"

• bucket_name: the AWS S3 bucket name you want to create. In most of the cases, it's equal to the domain name.
• domain_name: the domain name you want to use to expose your website.
• CNAMEs: the list of alternative domain names you want to redirect to the domain name.
• route_53_hosted_zone_id: the AWS Route53 hosted zone created. This
  guide shows how to create a new hosted zone and get his id.
• route_53_hosted_zone_name: the AWS Route53 hosted zone domain name.
• stack_name: the name of the stack which all the resources will be grouped in. In most of the cases, it's the domain name without dots .

Optional Parameters

• aws_profile_name: (optional) the AWS profile name configured in AWS CLI. If you didn't specify it, the profile name is default

Place this file inside the example-website/ folder previously created. The content of that folder should be

|—— example-website
|    |—— weblfow-files.zip
|    |—— webflow-aws-config.yaml

Publish your website

Now you are ready to publish your website online.

Go inside the folder created before that contains:

• webflow-aws-config.yaml file
• .zip file

To deploy your website, you have to execute this command:

webflow-aws publish

In 2 minutes, the content will be public available under the specified domain names.