I had this old Ruby script lying around which I was using to upload my sites to s3 whenever I wanted to deploy something new.

However, as you can imagine, copying this script around was not the best solution as in time, I added bits here and there, updated to use new aws-sdk etc, and keeping them all in sync was getting tedious …

Sooo, finally I nudged myself and put it in a gem. Ladies and Gentlemen, here is Emblaze ! It’s basically a rake task to minify & gzip & and upload a static site to S3.

Some of you may wonder, “What does Emblaze have to do with uploading a site to cloud ?”

Well, rest assured, the name has nothing to do with what it does. Initially I had a mind to call it aws-s3-deploy. But it turns out, that name was already taken. Along with a whole sloth of similar candidates, like s3Deploy, s3Deployer, etc … So I took the liberty to get creative …. So here you are with Emblaze !

What does it provide against the competition ? Well it’s compatible with the latest aws-sdk. And just requires s3-sdk so I tried to keep the deps to a minimum. It’s dotenv & travis compatible, so you can integrate it with your CI pipeline with minimum issues. I already use it to deploy all my sites.

Currently the site folder is fixed to _site. So it’s geared towards Jekyll sites. But you can deploy anything with it. I can add customised upload dirs without much trouble. But I am kind of waiting for someone to come and ask for it :) it will be more fun !