Hi, I'm Phil Freo

As an engineering team at @Close, we’re trying to write more about what we are learning/doing. I recently got to dabble in a little coding project, so I wrote it up. This post originally appeared on the Close Engineering Blog here.

We host our main marketing website, close.com, as a static site (in our case, generated via Lektor) served by AWS. We store all the staticly generated files in S3 and have a Cloudfront distribution in front as our CDN.

Occasionally, we’ll need to setup a redirect, to point an old URL to a new URL, for example when combining two pages.

In S3 hosted static websites like ours, there were basically two main ways to accomplish redirects…

On Close.io we originally implemented Filepicker.io to allow for file uploads while sending emails. While it was a quick way to get started with file uploading initially, after several minutes of downtime of their API and then an unannounced change in their JSON response format, I was reminded once again that you shouldn’t to rely on small startups for critical parts of your tech infrastructure.

There’s nothing wrong with filepicker.io if you want to use a lot of their features, but in our case we just needed to allow simple uploading of files to our own AWS S3 bucket. Here’s how:
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