miano / vaporfile

A tool to upload and synchronize static websites to the Amazon S3 cloud.

Vaporfile

Vaporfile is a tool to upload and synchronize static websites to the Amazon S3 cloud.

WARNING: This is alpha quality software, version 0.0.1. It works for me, but it may destroy your life. Be careful, test this out with non-important data first. I doubt I've done anything royally stupid here, but I guess it's technically possible that some unforseen bug could delete all of the buckets configured in your S3 account. YOU'VE BEEN WARNED.

Requirements

• Python 2.6 or above.
• An Amazon S3 account.
• The DEV version of boto (until 2.0b5 or greater is released).

Install

As of Feb 19 2011, the new S3 website extensions are one day old, needless to say, it's a bit bleeding edge. Vaporfile depends on the best Python bindings for Amazon S3: boto. The boto devs are really on top of their game and have already implemented the website features, but they haven't made it into a realeased version yet. For now, you'll need to install the dev version:

 git clone https://github.com/boto/boto.git
 sudo python boto/setup.py develop

Now you can install the DEV version of Vaporfile:

git clone https://github.com/EnigmaCurry/vaporfile.git
sudo python vaporfile/setup.py develop

Or, you can install the packaged version on PyPI (Not there yet):

sudo easy_install vaporfile

Uploading a website

Once Vaporfile is installed, you can run it to create a new website configuration:

    vaporfile create

This will run a configuration wizard that will get you started. It just asks you a few questions to get setup:

• Asks you for your Amazon AWS credentials.
• Configures your domain name / Amazon S3 bucket name.
• Configures the path of the website on your local drive.
• Configures the index page of your site (eg. index.html)
• Configures the 404 error page of your site.
• Creates the actual bucket on S3 and enables the website endpoint.

It saves all this configuration information in ~/.vaporfile, which includes your AWS credentials in plain text. The file is marked as readable only by your user account, so this should be reasonably safe on machines you control/trust.

Once you've created the site, you can upload it:

 vaporfile -v upload [name-of-website]

With the -v flag on, you'll see all the files it's uploading, otherwise it should silently complete.

Now make any changes you wish to your site locally, and run the upload again. Files that have changed will get re-uploaded, files that have been deleted locally will get deleted from S3 (unless you specify --no-delete).

Deployment

Vaporfile will upload your site to Amazon, but you still need to configure your domain to point to it.

The name you chose for your website when running vaporfile create is the bucket name created on S3. S3 creates a domain like this:

www.yourdomain.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com

Assuming you don't like that domain name, you'll probably want to point your own domain name to that location. You do that with a CNAME configured with your DNS provider -- create a CNAME record for www.yourdomain.com and point it to s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com.

Usage

You can see the rest of the usage by running vaporfile -h, but here it is:

usage: vaporfile [-h] [--version] [-c PATH] [-v] [-vv]
                 {credentials,create,list,upload} ...

positional arguments:
  {credentials,create,list,upload}
    credentials         Manage Amazon AWS credentials
    create              Create a new S3 website
    upload              Upload a previously configured website
    list                List all configured websites

optional arguments:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  --version
  -c PATH, --config PATH
                        Use alternative config file (defaults to ~/.vaporfie)
  -v, --verbose         Be verbose
  -vv, --veryverbose    Be extra verbose