Deployment

The Web app is containerised and deployed to AWS ECS Fargate, with CloudFront in front of the application for asset caching and request routing.

Build and push to ECR

Use the provided script from the repo root:

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

The script builds the Docker image and pushes it to the ECR repository defined by WEB_ECR_REPOSITORY_NAME in infrastructure/aws/.env.

Auto-deployment

The CDK Web stack deploys a Lambda trigger that listens for ECR PUSH events. When a new image is pushed, the trigger starts a new ECS rolling deployment automatically.

Dockerfile

The build uses a multi-stage Dockerfile:

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

This keeps the final image smaller by including only the files needed at runtime.

CloudFront

CloudFront sits in front of the ECS application. Static assets under /_next/static/* are cached at the edge, while dynamic requests continue through to the application.

If static assets need to be invalidated without a new Next.js build hash, create a manual invalidation:

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

The CDK stack provisions an ACM certificate and attaches it to the CloudFront distribution.