Introducing ember-cli-deploy-cloudfront and ember-cli-deploy-aws-pack

Nov 10, 2015

Last week, I blogged about deploying Ember to AWS CloudFront. At the end of the post, I noted two improvements I’d like to make:

Automate the CloudFront cache invalidation step
Package up the ember-cli-deploy plugins needed into a plugin pack

Today, I’m happy to introduce two open source plugins to make the deploy process to AWS CloudFront even simpler.

ember-cli-deploy-cloudfront

The ember-cli-deploy-cloudfront plugin automates the CloudFront cache invalidation step. To use it:

Install the plugin

$ ember install ember-cli-deploy-cloudfront

Add CloudFront configuration to config/deploy.js
```
ENV.cloudfront = {
  accessKeyId: '<your-aws-access-key>',
  secretAccessKey: '<your-aws-secret'>,
  distribution: '<your-cloudfront-distribution-id>'
}
```
Note: Make sure the keys used here for CloudFront have the proper permissions. If you’re using the same keys as before, you will need to add CloudFrontFullAccess via IAM.
Run the ember-cli-deploy pipeline with the activation flag
```
$ ember deploy production --activate
```

The plugin creates an invalidation with CloudFront for /index.html by default, though it can be configured to invalidate other CloudFront objects as well. See the README for more details.

Now that I’ve got a full set of ember-cli-deploy plugins suited to my deployment strategy, I’ve packaged them up into a plugin pack for easy installation as a group. To use the plugin pack in an Ember project (after you’ve configured S3 and CloudFront):

Install ember-cli-deploy and the plugin pack

$ ember install ember-cli-deploy
$ ember install ember-cli-deploy-aws-pack

Add deployment configuration secrets to .env.deploy.production

AWS_KEY=[Access Key ID]
AWS_SECRET=[Secret Access Key]
PRODUCTION_BUCKET=[AWS Bucket]
PRODUCTION_REGION=[AWS Region]
PRODUCTION_DISTRIBUTION=[CloudFront Distribution ID]

Run the ember-cli-deploy pipeline
```
$ ember deploy production
```

Notice that the --activate flag is no longer necessary since the plugin pack’s config/deploy.js blueprint sets ENV.pipeline.activateOnDeploy to true. This can be adjusted as needed (along with any other deploy configuration) to suit the specific use case.