How to prevent Cloudfront to cache some types of files?

To disable caching completely, go to CloudFront console, click on the ID value of your CloudFront distribution and navigate to Behaviors section. Select and edit the default entry. Your CachePolicy is probably set to CachingOptimized. Change it to CachingDisabled and save.

To cache only .EXE file, click Create behavior to create a new entry. Use *.exe for Path pattern and set CachePolicy to CachingOptimized

Your configuration should be similar to screenshot below

Since your files are already cached, you may want to clear CloudFront cache as well. Go to Invalidations section and click Create invalidation

Edit: Your configuration looks correct. *.exe files are cached as per curl command below

% curl -I https://download.datanumen.com/downloads/file/daccr.exe
HTTP/2 200
...
vary: Accept-Encoding
x-cache: Hit from cloudfront
...

Others are not cached by CloudFront

% curl -I https://download.datanumen.com/
HTTP/2 200
...
x-cache: Miss from cloudfront

Any caching if any is by your origin (www.datanumen.com). It is using Cloudflare. Suggest you change your CloudFront origin to your EC2 (?) domain name.

Hi,

I check my distribution and find it already have a behavior, so I think the most simple way is to edit it and change the pattern from * to *.exe, as below:

But I cannot make the change. Why?

Hi, Mike

I just follow your instructions, except that we have a custom cache policy with our own defined settings, below is my setting: And I have clear the cache as below:

But, when visiting https://download.datanumen.com (the domain used by Amazon Cloudfront), I will still see our company page. Am I doing something wrong?

Hello.

I think the following documents will be helpful.
https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/prevent-cloudfront-from-caching-files

I thought it would be a good idea to target only ".exe" by setting the cache key etc.
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/controlling-the-cache-key.html

I recommend following Mike L's instructions, that is exactly what you need to do.

To elaborate, CloudFront uses Behaviors, and you can think of them as rules. They have an order of execution, with 0 being first, 1 next, then 2, etc. Inside a Behavior you define what path you want to match on, in this case *.exe. You also can define other things, such as a caching policy, which origin to use, etc.