How to get a Serverless web app working with your own domain and SSL on AWS, the right way
Recently, I built a very simple CMS software to serve as the engine for my website La Siesta Americana (literally The American Siesta, like The American Dream but lazier). Why to build a CMS in 2020? There’s actually little or no reason, but I wanted to publish my content and literally no option in the market satisfied me, so I built my own for fun and to make a statement: we need no complex services, no plugins, no templating engines, no databases to publish content.
When my good friend and business partner Pedro saw it working, suggested that I published the software, and named it “Siesta” or similar, and here we are, ten hours later. I thought a CMS worth of its name needed to be shown in action, so I decided to use it to build its own product website.
The application is based on the Serverless framework, and I wanted to deploy it to my AWS account using a custom domain, with HTTP to HTTPS redirection that worked both for the www domain and the naked version (the one with no www). So, in other words: http://siestacms.com, https://siestacms.com, http://www.siestacms.com all needed to redirect to https://www.siestacms.com seamlessly.
I also wanted two subdomains: dev.siestacms.com to host the development stage, and prod.siestacms.com to host the production one. www.siestacms.com would replicate or act as an alias for the production subdomain. The naked domain siestacms.com will just redirect to www, but I wanted such redirection to work for both HTTP and HTTPS.
If you’ve played around with AWS CloudFront you know that was going to be an epic battle.
The ultimate step-by-step guide
Since this was more complex than I first thought, I want to share my struggle so humanity won’t solve this problem more than once. This guide will walk you through the process I followed.
First, create your app
I used Serverless framework to build my service. You can check out the code on GitHub if you want to use it as a template. I’ll be using it as a reference to make my instructions a bit easier to understand.
