Deploy Preact + Vite on AWS S3 and CloudFront

You can deploy a Preact single-page application (SPA) with Vite on your AWS account.

There are two ways to deploy your Preact SPA on AWS:

1. Using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK) with the CDK-SPA package.

2. Using the Thunder console to deploy your app with a few clicks.

The build artifacts (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) will be stored in an S3 bucket and served using CloudFront CDN.

Deploy using AWS CDK

CDK-SPA is a package that simplifies the deployment of single-page applications (SPAs) to AWS using the AWS Cloud Development Kit (CDK). It provides a straightforward way to deploy your Preact app to AWS S3 and CloudFront.

1. Create a project

You can create a new Vite project with Preact using the following command:

npm create vite@latest my-preact-app -- --template preact
cd my-preact-app
npm install

pnpm create vite my-preact-app --template preact
cd my-preact-app
pnpm install

bun create vite my-preact-app --template preact
cd my-preact-app
bun install

2. Initialize your project

Install the necessary dependencies and initialize your project:

npm i tsx aws-cdk-lib @thunderso/cdk-spa --save-dev

pnpm add -D tsx aws-cdk-lib @thunderso/cdk-spa

bun add -d tsx aws-cdk-lib @thunderso/cdk-spa

Create a stack/index.ts file. Edit it to match your project:

import { App } from "aws-cdk-lib";
import { SPAStack, type SPAProps } from "@thunderso/cdk-spa";

const myApp: SPAProps = {
  env: {
    account: 'your-account-id',
    region: 'us-east-1'
  },
  application: 'your-application-id',
  service: 'your-service-id',
  environment: 'production',

  rootDir: '', // e.g. 'frontend/' for monorepos
  outputDir: 'dist/',
};

new SPAStack(
  new App(),
  `${myApp.application}-${myApp.service}-${myApp.environment}-stack`,
  myApp
);

3. Deploy

Before you deploy, run your build script to generate artifacts in the dist directory.

npm run build

pnpm run build

bun run build

By running the following script, the CDK stack will be deployed to AWS.

npx cdk deploy --all --app="npx tsx stack/index.ts"

pnpm exec cdk deploy --all --app="pnpm exec tsx stack/index.ts"

npx cdk deploy --all --app="bunx tsx stack/index.ts"

When the deployment is complete, you will see the CloudFront URL in the output. You can access your Preact app at that URL.

For complete documentation on how to use CDK-SPA, refer to the CDK-SPA documentation.

Deploy using Thunder console

You can also deploy your Preact app on AWS using the Thunder console.

Build Settings

Use the following commands in the build step settings:

npm install

npm run build

dist

npx pnpm install

npx pnpm run build

dist

npx bun install

npx bun run build

dist

Environment Variables

Environment variables in Vite are available at build time and can be used both in your config files and templates. For more information, refer to the official Vite documentation on environment variables.

1. Define your environment variables in the Thunder console under the Environment Variables section of your project settings.

2. In your code, you can define them in an .env file at the root of your project:

VITE_BASE_URL=https://thunder.so

Use it in your templates:

const url = import.meta.env.VITE_BASE_URL;

export function App() {
  return (
    <>
      <div>
        <a href={url} target="_blank">Thunder</a>
      </div>
    </>
  )
}