Deployment

The Web app is containerised and deployed to AWS ECS Fargate, fronted by CloudFront CDN.

Build and push to ECR

./scripts/push-web-to-ecr.sh
# Or with a tag:
./scripts/push-web-to-ecr.sh v1.2.3

The script builds the Docker image using the multi-stage Dockerfile, then pushes it to the ECR repository defined by WEB_ECR_REPOSITORY_NAME in infrastructure/aws/.env.

Dockerfile

Builder stage — installs dependencies and runs next build with output: 'standalone'
Production stage — copies .next/standalone, .next/static, and public/ into a minimal Node 24 Alpine image

Container size is kept small by the standalone output — only the files actually used at runtime are included.

Auto-deployment

The CDK Web Stack deploys a Lambda trigger that watches for ECR PUSH events. A new image push automatically initiates an ECS rolling deployment.

CloudFront

The CDK stack places CloudFront in front of the ECS ALB. Static assets (/_next/static/*) are cached at the edge with long TTLs. Dynamic pages pass through to ECS.

If you update static assets without changing the Next.js build hash, invalidate the CloudFront distribution manually:

aws cloudfront create-invalidation \
  --distribution-id <DISTRIBUTION_ID> \
  --paths "/_next/static/*"

Custom domain

Set the following in infrastructure/aws/.env before deploying:

WEB_DOMAIN_ENABLED=true
WEB_DOMAIN_NAME=example.com
WEB_DOMAIN_ADD_WWW=true
DOMAIN_HOSTED_ZONE_NAME=example.com

CDK will create an ACM certificate and attach it to the CloudFront distribution.