static website content does not update

Question

I have a static website hosted on s3 using cloudfront.  Domain hosted on Route53.  My initial deployment worked fine and the app served at the domain.  But when I upload changes to s3, the modified files do not serve.  Files on s3 are definitely updating.  So it appears that cloudfront is caching and serving the old files.

I found these articles: https://repost.aws/questions/QUfh2n4klfRHuzKpGJsjOkNA/old-s3-content-being-served-help and https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30154461/aws-cloudfront-not-updating-on-update-of-files-in-s3

Have tried a) creating an invalidation in my cloudfront distribution, b) creating a cache policy with 0 min ttl / 10 max ttl and applied to my cloudfront default behavior, c) adding Cache-Control headers to my s3 objects with max-age=1 (by updating the metadata on all the files).  None of these approaches correct the problem.

FWIW, I have another distro set up on a different domain - exactly the same set up.  Never had any issues with that one.  The only difference is that the domain for that one is hosted by a third party, not Route53...

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Answer

I also encountered this same issue and tried changing the cache-control max-age to 0 for an individual file that I changed, but Cloudfront still served up the old file.   I followed @rePost-User-2827836 suggestion to delete all the files from S3 and re-upload the files from my computer, and Cloudfront was able to serve the updated site files.

Not sure, but perhaps just deleting the file I changed and uploading that particular file again to S3 would've worked.

I would like to know more about the mechanisms behind how Cloudfront pulls files from the s3 bucket (are old copies of files stored somewhere even when overwritten?) to cache on the edge network.

Answer

It is possible to delete the CloudFront cache using the method described in the following document.  
https://repost.aws/knowledge-center/cloudfront-clear-cache

static website content does not update

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