If you use Amazon servers to host your Shorthand stories you can sync up your Shorthand account to push directly to a bucket on that server – removing the need to manually download and upload or export files.

SFTP works almost exactly the same way, except instead of using S3, you enter the SFTP details of your own server. This is useful if you have your own server infrastructure and do not use S3.

Note: This feature is available only on some plans. To discuss adding this feature, please get in touch.

Setup

The workspace owner can set up the hosting via the Workspace Settings page.

Under 'Publishing' click to 'Add a new publishing configuration'.

Here you will need to enter:

PROVIDER (S3)
NAME - This is what users will see when choosing to publish to this host
DESCRIPTION - The description can help describe additional information about the publish configuration.
BUCKET NAME - The bucket the story will be published to (you can also put subdirectories in here to publish to a subfolder within the bucket)
REGION - The region that the S3 bucket was created with
URL BASE - (Only used to provide a quick link to the published story).
The URL that the S3 Bucket corresponds to, with a trailing slash (e.g. http://s3-ap-southeast-1.amazonaws.com/bucket/ or http://shorthand.myorganisation.com/). For more information setting up S3 custom URLs, please see here
AUTHENTICATION METHOD - Secret Key + Access Key or IAM Role (IAM role is preferred)
ACCESS KEY - The AWS account ACCESS KEY
SECRET KEY - The AWS account SECRET KEY
ALLOW PUBLIC READ ACCESS FOR PUBLISHED FILES - Defaults to true; Allows published story files to be publicly accessible in your chosen S3 bucket such as using an S3 hosting website. Disable if you want to secure it with CloudFront and CloudFront Origin Access Identity. For more information, please see the Amazon S3 documentation
ONLY USE THIS CONFIGURATION TO HOST ASSETS? - This can be enabled to hide the publishing configuration from the publishing panel in the Shorthand editor and restrict publishing to our API in the event that you only want the story assets to be hosted on S3. Typically this will be left disabled.
AWS KMS ARN - The AWS KMS ARN is only needed if you are using S3 bucket server-side encryption with AWS Key Management Service (SSE-KMS). For more information, please refer to Specifying KMS Encryption with AWS

Your bucket must be configured to 'enable website hosting', and also be set up with a bucket policy that allows your AWS credentials to push details. This policy will follow the pattern outlined below (replace anything within []):

{ 	
  "Version": "2008-10-17", 	
  "Statement": [
    { 			
      "Sid": "PublicReadForGetBucketObjects",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": { "AWS": "*" },
      "Action": "s3:GetObject",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::[BUCKET_NAME]/*"
    },
    {
      "Sid": "",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": { "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::[IAM_DETAILS]" },
      "Action": "s3:*",
      "Resource": [
        "arn:aws:s3:::[BUCKET_NAME]",
        "arn:aws:s3:::[BUCKET_NAME]/*"
      ]
    }
  ] 
}

Once set up, a workspace owner can enable the server as a publishing option per-team, and a team leader can choose to enable individual team members to publish to that location. See these support pages for more info on managing publishing:

Publishing to the server can then be achieved with the 'Publish' button in the story editor without the need to download a ZIP folder or manually export files.

Publish directly to an Amazon S3 or SFTP location

Setup