Using AWS to Host a Static Website - Part 4

In part 3 I walked through the creation of the Amazon S3 bucket where the static website content will reside. In this post I will walk through using CloudFormation to create an Amazon Route 53 public hosted zone. This is automatically created when a domain is registered using Amazon Route 53 so this is for completeness and is not required for this series of posts.

The Sequence

This is a very straight forward process and only has one step which is to create the public hosted zone. However, I am introducing the use of a parameter file to simplify the AWSCLI. This is in the JSON format and will only have one parameter. The public hosted zone I am creating is foobar.com which is made up and is likely to exist but because I am not changing the name server details at the registrar level it will not interfere with anything. However I recommend you use a domain owned by you if you want to try this out.

The CloudFormation Template

This CloudFormation template is available here.

AWSTemplateFormatVersion: "2010-09-09"
Description: "CloudFormation template to create Route 53 public hosted zone"

Parameters:
  DomainName:
    Type: String
    Description: The domain name for the hosted zone (e.g., example.com)

Resources:
  PublicHostedZone:
    Type: AWS::Route53::HostedZone
    Properties:
      Name: !Ref DomainName
      HostedZoneConfig:
        Comment: !Sub "Public hosted zone for ${DomainName}"

Outputs:
  HostedZoneId:
    Description: "Hosted Zone ID"
    Value: !Ref PublicHostedZone

  NameServers:
    Description: "Nameservers for the hosted zone. Update these at your domain registrar."
    Value: !Join
      - ", "
      - !GetAtt PublicHostedZone.NameServers

The parameter file is very simple.

[{ "ParameterKey": "DomainName", "ParameterValue": "foobar.com" }]

Deploying the CloudFormation Template

As mentioned, the parameter is stored in a file so the deployment is slightly different to accommodate this change.

aws cloudformation create-stack --stack-name STACKNAME --template-body file://route53-public-zone.yaml \
--parameters file://parameters.json --region us-east-1 

The STACKNAME can be whatever you choose but I recommend it is meaningful.

Conclusion

A very simple CloudFormation template and a parameter file there is a repeatable way of setting up a Route 53 public hosted zone. In the next post I will walk through setting up SSL certificates for use with the domain using AWS Certificate Manager.

Using AWS to Host a Static Website - Part 5