How to self-host Sanity content as static files in S3?

4 replies

Last updated: Dec 7, 2021

hello all 👋I'd like to ask some pretty basic questions about how sanity works..
see, I have a sysadmin profile, I am not a developer and I am trying to understand how to self host sanity.
I've read the docs and tested the studio on my laptop, but as far as I can tell, when I upload content to my site, that content goes to some sanity server and is served from there.
is there a way for me to write a static site and just build all the static files and host that myself in like an s3 bucket or something like that ?

AI Update

Hey there! Great question, and I can understand the confusion coming from a sysadmin background. Let me break this down for you:

The short answer: No, you cannot self-host the Sanity Content Lake (the database where your content is stored). However, you can absolutely build a static site and host it yourself in S3 or anywhere else!

How Sanity's Architecture Works

You're correct in your observation - when you create content in Sanity Studio, that content is stored in Sanity's Content Lake, which is hosted on Google Cloud Platform. This is a managed, cloud-hosted database that cannot be self-hosted. Think of it like using AWS RDS - you don't host the database itself, but you have full control over your data.

However, Sanity Studio (the editing interface) is open-source and can be self-hosted. You can build it and deploy it anywhere - your own servers, S3, Netlify, Vercel, etc.

Static Site Generation - This Is What You Want!

Here's the good news: You can absolutely query your content from Sanity's Content Lake and build completely static files that you host yourself. This is actually one of the most popular ways to use Sanity! Here's how it works:

Content lives in Sanity - Editors manage content in Sanity Studio
Build time - Your static site generator queries Sanity's API and pulls all the content
Static files generated - All HTML/CSS/JS is built into static files
Host anywhere - Deploy these files to S3, Cloudflare, your own servers, etc.

Popular static site generators that work great with Sanity include:

Next.js with Static Site Generation (SSG) - Use getStaticProps to fetch data at build time
Gatsby - Uses the gatsby-source-sanity plugin to pull all content into Gatsby's GraphQL layer
Eleventy - A simpler JavaScript-based static generator
Astro, Hugo, or any other SSG - They all can query Sanity's API

Exporting Your Data

If you're concerned about vendor lock-in, Sanity provides dataset export functionality via the CLI:

sanity dataset export production backup.tar.gz

This exports all your documents and assets in NDJSON format, which is portable and can be imported elsewhere or processed with standard tools.

Typical Workflow

Here's a common setup for what you're describing:

Editors work in Sanity Studio (hosted on sanity.studio or self-hosted)
Content is saved to Sanity's Content Lake
A build process (triggered manually or via webhook when content changes) runs your static site generator
The generator queries Sanity's API and builds static HTML files
Static files are deployed to S3, CloudFront, or your own infrastructure
Users access your completely static site - no connection to Sanity needed at runtime

This gives you the benefits of a powerful CMS for editors while maintaining full control over your frontend hosting and having zero runtime dependencies on Sanity's infrastructure.

Does this help clarify things? The key insight is that Sanity is "headless" - it only manages the content, but you have complete freedom in how you build and host your actual website!

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4 replies

I understand I am lacking some basics on how this product works, so if there is some documentation that explains what I want to do, please refer me there 🙂

Hi User, The short version is that by design, you can't self-host your data -- it is indeed managed by Sanity in the cloud -- but you have total control over the shape and content of the data. The studio is the principal client to your data set, and one way it gets configured, but you can also read, write, patch from other clients, or raw http.
And, if I understand the second part of your question correctly, it's a very common use case to use a static site builder that pulls data from your Sanity datastore, and then renders it to static html, wether it's on S3 or any other hosting provider.

And all that said, if you are a sysadmin and configuring AWS stuff directly is in your comfort zone, then that's awesome
😎. However, you may already know this, but there are tons of services out there that abstract all that stuff away and make the build/deploy process extremely easy. A lot of that is in the starters below:

Also, the guides and starters sections have information about static builds, and this is a great video intro to building with Sanity https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRzQpWc3zNPnmQgTZdTR-sCvYfj5Uil6s

damn I never got a slack notification.. I thought noone answered me.thank you so much User for your time explaining this
🙏

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