9 ms·

Show HN: Stasis, a simple static site generator with deployment to S3/CloudFront

49 points by czep 6y ago

freedomben 6y ago
I built something like this for one of my sites and ended up deeply regretting it when my hosting for the month hit $100 (due to bandwidth/data fees). I now pay $5 a month with nginx on Linode/Cloudflare. If you pay for this out of your own pocket and your site doesn't make any money, consider bandwidth/data costs first.
- docuru 6y ago
  For the $100, Was it because there was too many static files, plus frequently update? (beside user visits)
  - ivanhoe 6y ago
    Probably, the hidden costs of running in cloud can be tricky...
    - freedomben 6y ago
      Yep, frequent updates, lots of high quality images and some videos. That also made a huge spike in traffic painful because I wasn't expecting it. Having a page go viral can have unforeseen consequences :-)
      - ivanhoe 6y ago
        One should always set alarms on expanses
- sweeneyrod 6y ago
  $100/month gets you around 1TB on CloudFront doesn't it? If that's all web pages, surely you should be getting enough traffic that you can monetise somehow for the cost to be negligible.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Yep it was right around 1TB :-) (high quality images and videos, combined with a viral page)
- thamer 6y ago
  Was this with very large files? I remember a similar HN comment a while back and couldn't see how this would happen with a static site. If you store 1 GB of data in total in us-east-1 and serve 1 request per second with an average size of 100 KB, it would cost $1.28 per month[1] for S3 and $25.38 for CF without the free tier, $20.24 total with the free tier. That's much more than most static websites ever store and ever serve. I use S3 & CloudFront for multiple static websites (all low-traffic, < 50 pages with some images) and the cost per site for hosting is less than I pay to renew its domain each year. I used to do these by hand and finally started using Hugo a few years ago, and love the solution. Everything is simple to set up, the SSL cert is free and auto-renewed, the performance is great and the costs are negligible. For the vast majority of small static websites and even up to thousands of page views a day I find this approach ideal. (obligatory: I am not affiliated with Amazon in any way, just a happy customer). [1] on https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html — S3 page -> Standard, Storage: 1GB, GET: 2628000 requests, returned: 262.8 GB. CloudFront page -> Data transfer out: 262.8 GB, Average object size: 100 KB.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Yes, I host quite a few high-quality images and videos that can really add up. It's not shocking to see it come close to 1 TB a month.
rualca 6y ago
I don't understand the point of this project. S3 and cloudfront is already designed to deploy static sites. I mean, one of the basic S3 tutorials is to show how to deploy a pure HTML+CSS site on S3. Hell, there is even a myriad of tutorials showing how to deploy React and Angular apps to S3. All it takes is to copy the artifacts to the bucket.
alex-wallish 6y ago
This is pretty cool. Reminds me a bit of Cactus which hasn't been updated in 3 years. Is there any support pretty urls?
mekkkkkk 6y ago
So it's Jekyll, but in Python, with the added benefit of... what exactly? Deploying on a CDN is a one line shell script. Maybe I'm missing something. There seems to be a lot of static site generators being advertised nowadays. Is it because none of the big ones are feature complete? Or is it just a fun/easy thing to do as a hobby project?
- softwaredoug 6y ago
  I think the latter. And users of static site generators like Jekyll tend to like to tinker a lot within Jekyll. It’s a natural transition to try and build your own.
- ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
  I think it’s the same “build your own blog” project we all share only with modern tools and architecture. Shout-out to the ancient “Staticmatic” Ruby gem, first open-source project I even contributed to, and still got the best name
- nerdponx 6y ago
  There has been a glut of SSGs out there for years. I think the most popular/mature Python-based one is called Pelican. It's a case of them all being slightly opinionated, and it's relatively easy and fun to make your own that suits your own needs.
- ivanhoe 6y ago
  well, it certainly doesn't hurt to have more to choose from. It's been a popular subject, so people are coming up with their own approaches. Time will filter out those worth the attention.
- jjjbokma 6y ago
  For me the latter. I wrote a static microblog generator [0] for my own site [1]. There is both a Perl and a Python version. I wrote the latter to learn more about Python. [0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog [1] https://plurrrr.com/ https://plurrrr.com/
dceddia 6y ago
The linked blog post was a good read about why the author went down this path, goals of the project, and some technical challenges along the way: https://czep.net/20/stasis.html https://czep.net/20/stasis.html As someone with a Jekyll blog who's considered changing SSG's a few times in the past, this was interesting to read. I could see myself going down a similar path. Gatsby adds a lot of complexity that IMO isn't a big benefit for a simple blog, and when I tried migrating my site to it, a lot of existing posts were broken in weird ways. Eleventy is "Jekyll but in JavaScript" and way closer to what I want, but its flavor of Liquid is just slightly different from Jekyll's to the point where I would have to update a bunch of posts, plus there's no incremental build yet. So I'm still sticking with Jekyll for now. Maybe one day I'll break down and build my own SSG like the author...
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  > Eleventy is "Jekyll but in JavaScript" and way closer to what I want, but its flavor of Liquid is just slightly different from Jekyll's to the point where I would have to update a bunch of posts, plus there's no incremental build yet. So much for > bamboleo 3 days ago [–] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561177 > You can’t be serious. Jekyll blogs are pure text files you can download and view in a thousand ways. Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata. Unless SSG get a common metadata and/or post format I don't think migration is as smooth as some say it is. In the XML days we had ATOM. I don't know if we have any JSON/MD things like that ?
  - ratww 6y ago
    The posts on those are just Markdown, and most of them use the same metadata format. For Atom/RSS you can use a plugin in Jekyll or 11ty. It's really not that complicated...
    - johnchristopher 6y ago
      I believe you are missing my point. I am not talking about syndication, I am talking about a reliable standard post/content format that would guarantee interoperability and plug and playability between static CMS. Without tweaking.
icy 6y ago
I'm not sure how I feel about shelling out to pandoc when they could've used something like mistletoe. And pushing to a CDN needn't be a part of the tool. I too recently (re)wrote my SSG, in Go: https://github.com/icyphox/go-vite https://github.com/icyphox/go-vite, ditching my old Python one.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

49 points by czep 6y ago

I built something like this for one of my sites and ended up deeply regretting it when my hosting for the month hit $100 (due to bandwidth/data fees). I now pay $5 a month with nginx on Linode/Cloudflare. If you pay for this out of your own pocket and your site doesn't make any money, consider bandwidth/data costs first.

docuru 6y ago
For the $100, Was it because there was too many static files, plus frequently update? (beside user visits)
- ivanhoe 6y ago
  Probably, the hidden costs of running in cloud can be tricky...
  - freedomben 6y ago
    Yep, frequent updates, lots of high quality images and some videos. That also made a huge spike in traffic painful because I wasn't expecting it. Having a page go viral can have unforeseen consequences :-)
    - ivanhoe 6y ago
      One should always set alarms on expanses
sweeneyrod 6y ago
$100/month gets you around 1TB on CloudFront doesn't it? If that's all web pages, surely you should be getting enough traffic that you can monetise somehow for the cost to be negligible.
- freedomben 6y ago
  Yep it was right around 1TB :-) (high quality images and videos, combined with a viral page)
thamer 6y ago
Was this with very large files? I remember a similar HN comment a while back and couldn't see how this would happen with a static site. If you store 1 GB of data in total in us-east-1 and serve 1 request per second with an average size of 100 KB, it would cost $1.28 per month[1] for S3 and $25.38 for CF without the free tier, $20.24 total with the free tier. That's much more than most static websites ever store and ever serve. I use S3 & CloudFront for multiple static websites (all low-traffic, < 50 pages with some images) and the cost per site for hosting is less than I pay to renew its domain each year. I used to do these by hand and finally started using Hugo a few years ago, and love the solution. Everything is simple to set up, the SSL cert is free and auto-renewed, the performance is great and the costs are negligible. For the vast majority of small static websites and even up to thousands of page views a day I find this approach ideal. (obligatory: I am not affiliated with Amazon in any way, just a happy customer). [1] on https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html https://calculator.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html — S3 page -> Standard, Storage: 1GB, GET: 2628000 requests, returned: 262.8 GB. CloudFront page -> Data transfer out: 262.8 GB, Average object size: 100 KB.
- freedomben 6y ago
  Yes, I host quite a few high-quality images and videos that can really add up. It's not shocking to see it come close to 1 TB a month.

rualca 6y ago

I don't understand the point of this project. S3 and cloudfront is already designed to deploy static sites. I mean, one of the basic S3 tutorials is to show how to deploy a pure HTML+CSS site on S3. Hell, there is even a myriad of tutorials showing how to deploy React and Angular apps to S3. All it takes is to copy the artifacts to the bucket.

alex-wallish 6y ago

This is pretty cool. Reminds me a bit of Cactus which hasn't been updated in 3 years. Is there any support pretty urls?

mekkkkkk 6y ago

So it's Jekyll, but in Python, with the added benefit of... what exactly? Deploying on a CDN is a one line shell script. Maybe I'm missing something. There seems to be a lot of static site generators being advertised nowadays. Is it because none of the big ones are feature complete? Or is it just a fun/easy thing to do as a hobby project?

softwaredoug 6y ago
I think the latter. And users of static site generators like Jekyll tend to like to tinker a lot within Jekyll. It’s a natural transition to try and build your own.
ulisesrmzroche 6y ago
I think it’s the same “build your own blog” project we all share only with modern tools and architecture. Shout-out to the ancient “Staticmatic” Ruby gem, first open-source project I even contributed to, and still got the best name
nerdponx 6y ago
There has been a glut of SSGs out there for years. I think the most popular/mature Python-based one is called Pelican. It's a case of them all being slightly opinionated, and it's relatively easy and fun to make your own that suits your own needs.
ivanhoe 6y ago
well, it certainly doesn't hurt to have more to choose from. It's been a popular subject, so people are coming up with their own approaches. Time will filter out those worth the attention.
jjjbokma 6y ago
For me the latter. I wrote a static microblog generator [0] for my own site [1]. There is both a Perl and a Python version. I wrote the latter to learn more about Python. [0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog [1] https://plurrrr.com/ https://plurrrr.com/

dceddia 6y ago

The linked blog post was a good read about why the author went down this path, goals of the project, and some technical challenges along the way: https://czep.net/20/stasis.html https://czep.net/20/stasis.html As someone with a Jekyll blog who's considered changing SSG's a few times in the past, this was interesting to read. I could see myself going down a similar path. Gatsby adds a lot of complexity that IMO isn't a big benefit for a simple blog, and when I tried migrating my site to it, a lot of existing posts were broken in weird ways. Eleventy is "Jekyll but in JavaScript" and way closer to what I want, but its flavor of Liquid is just slightly different from Jekyll's to the point where I would have to update a bunch of posts, plus there's no incremental build yet. So I'm still sticking with Jekyll for now. Maybe one day I'll break down and build my own SSG like the author...

johnchristopher 6y ago
> Eleventy is "Jekyll but in JavaScript" and way closer to what I want, but its flavor of Liquid is just slightly different from Jekyll's to the point where I would have to update a bunch of posts, plus there's no incremental build yet. So much for > bamboleo 3 days ago [–] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561177 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25561177 > You can’t be serious. Jekyll blogs are pure text files you can download and view in a thousand ways. Good luck extracting sensible data from WordPress’ database without losing metadata. Unless SSG get a common metadata and/or post format I don't think migration is as smooth as some say it is. In the XML days we had ATOM. I don't know if we have any JSON/MD things like that ?
- ratww 6y ago
  The posts on those are just Markdown, and most of them use the same metadata format. For Atom/RSS you can use a plugin in Jekyll or 11ty. It's really not that complicated...
  - johnchristopher 6y ago
    I believe you are missing my point. I am not talking about syndication, I am talking about a reliable standard post/content format that would guarantee interoperability and plug and playability between static CMS. Without tweaking.

icy 6y ago

I'm not sure how I feel about shelling out to pandoc when they could've used something like mistletoe. And pushing to a CDN needn't be a part of the tool. I too recently (re)wrote my SSG, in Go: https://github.com/icyphox/go-vite https://github.com/icyphox/go-vite, ditching my old Python one.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]