This walk-through is a simple step-by-step guide to deploying a React Web application to Amazon S3 using Github Actions or Bitbucket Pipelines
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)?
Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is one of the numerous services offered by Amazon Web Services(AWS), an on-demand cloud computing platform. Amazon S3 provides scalable object storage through a web service interface that is used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web.
Github Actions?
GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate your workflows like build, test, and deploy when using Github, a platform that provides hosting for software development version control using Git.
In this post, we will go through:
How to create an Amazon S3 bucket.
How to set up an S3 bucket for Web Hosting.
How to configure our Github actions to automatically deploy changes to the S3 bucket. In the end, deploy a React App to live.
Before we get started, you need to have:
Github Account
Bitbucket Account
AWS Account
Create Amazon S3 Bucket
First, log in to your AWS account. On the AWS Management Console, click S3
from the list of services under the Storage
section or use the search bar.
On the Amazon S3
page, click on Create Bucket
To create a bucket, provide a Bucket Name
. An S3
bucket name must be unique amid all buckets universally in Amazon S3. Also, take note of the Region
you are creating the bucket in. For this post, we are using Asai Pacific(Tokyo)
which is ap-northeast-1
Uncheck the checkbox for Block all public access
. After, click on Create bucket
.
Add Bucket Policy
This makes the contents of your bucket publicly available. This action is not recommended when working with S3 buckets, but for this our purpose this is fine.
Under Buckets, choose the name of your bucket (react-deploy-ci-cd)
> Choose Permissions
> Choose Bucket Policy
.
Copy the following bucket policy, and paste it in the editor.
Update the snippet to include your bucket name. In the bucket policy,
<bucket-name>
you must update this name to match your bucket name.Then, click on
Save changes
Enable Static Website Hosting
Choose Properties
> Choose Static website hosting
.Click on edit and enable static website hosting.
In Static website hosting choose enable and type index.html
in the Index document
field and Save changes
.
Note: Take note of the Endpoint URL, our website will be accessible in the browser using this URL.
Create and Push React App to GitHub And Bitbucket
Now we have our S3 bucket, it’s time to create and push our React App to GitHub.
Create a
New Repository
on GitHub.Create a
New Repository
on Bitbucket.
After creating a repository, You could:
- Create a React application using Create React App and ensure that there is a build script in the
package.json
file will output to adist
folder. OR Clone the sample React App repositoryS3-Github Actions React App
that we will be using for this post and add your repository'sremote
URL. GitHub Repo - S3-Github Actions React App
To set up our workflow, we need to provide the
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
and AWS_REGION
of the S3
bucket in other to connect successfully to Amazon S3.
Get AWS Authorization
On the AWS Console:
Click on
IAM
Click on
Users
and select your preferred user.Under
Security Credentials
, click onCreate Access Key
. This will create anAWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID
andAWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
, copy these values. You can also manage key access by either deleting or making it inactive.
Never share your access keys.
So that’s why we will be passing some very important values as Secrets
on GitHub then later access them in the workflow file using the expression syntax. ${{ <expression> }}
Back to Github
Click on the Settings
tab, Select Secret
on the left menu, then click on New Secret
to add a secret providing the Name
and Value
.
Setup Github Actions
Now, we have the S3
bucket set up and a React app to deploy.
On the GitHub repository, click on the Actions
tab to open the Github actions page. On the Actions
page, click on the set up a workflow yourself
-> button, this will redirect to a new page with a web editor containing some code.
First, let’s name the workflow file. You can leave the filename as main.yml
, but it is best to give it a descriptive name.
Copy and paste the code snippet into the editor. Copy and Paste, a developer’s superpower.
Now, let’s breakdown the code snippet above.
name
: We define the name of this action. This will be used to identify the action amid may others you may have.on
: We define trigger withon
:push
also the branch. This workflow will run anytime youpush
code to themaster
branch.jobs
: Workflow run is made up of one or more jobs and they run in parallel by default.steps
: A job contains a sequence of tasks called steps. Steps can run commands, run setup tasks, or run action in your repository and each step starts either with auses:
or aname:
.actions/checkout@v3: This action checks-out your repository, so your workflow can access it.
aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials@v1: This configures AWS credentials and region environment variables for use in other GitHub Actions.
Build React App: This step block installs the node packages and runs the
build
in thepackage.json
file, which creates abuild
folder in the root directory.Deploy app build to S3 bucket: This deploys the newly created build to
S3
bucket<bucket-name>
(replace<bucket-name>
with the name of yourS3
bucket. Mine isreact-deploy-ci-cd
).
To save, click on the Start Commit
then Commit New File
. This will,
save the action, creating a
.github
directory with aworkflows
directory in it that contains the new filemain
(the file name you used earlier)Trigger the action.
To check the progress, click on the Actions
tab.
Setup Bitbucket Pipelines
Setup the Deployment variables for you repository.
On the Bitbucket repository, open Repository settings page and click on Deployments and create Variables according to your environments here we are creating for production.
After that, For bitbucket pipelines add new file with name bitbucket-pipelines.yml and Copy and paste the code snippet into file.
If you are using aws-cloudfront then uncomment last pipe in yml file and remove ACL: public-read. it will triggering a distribution invalidation to refresh the CDN caches.
Finally both action ran successfully. Yay!! 🎊
You can now check your S3
bucket, you would see that the build files have been uploaded to it.
Our site is now live!!! On the browser, go to the Endpoint
URL (http://<s3-bucket>.s3-website-<s3-region>.amazonaws.com)
that we came across when enabling Static Website Hosting
. Now, any change you make to your react app will build and upload to your S3
bucket which will update live.
You can go on to work with Github or Bitbucket Actions by triggering an action on Pull Request
that might run some CI tests and perform several steps before deploying to your S3
.
If this guide has been helpful to you and your team please share it with others!
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