CloudFront Distribution not serving S3 Bucket pages unless /index.html included in URL

1

I have a Gatsby site that I upload to an S3 bucket. The S3 bucket has all public access blocked and its domain (my-bucket.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com) is the origin of a CloudFront distribution. I set it up so that the CDN is using an OAI to access content in the S3 bucket. When I originally uploaded this content, it worked fine: I could go to <my-cdn>.cloudfront.net/test-page and it would serve up the s3::my-bucket/index.html file.

I'm not sure if this caused my issue, but after adding a step in my CI/CD process (Azure Pipelines) to invalidate the CDN cache after it's uploaded my Gatsby build to the S3 Bucket, now I can't access <my-cdn>.cloudfront.net/test-page via a browser.

  • Now I have to include /index.html in the URL (like .../test-page/index.html) which serves the static document successfully and changes the url to .../test-page/.
  • If I try to use the path with a trailing/ (like .../test-page/) before I've gone to .../test-page/index.html, I get access denied. But once I go to .../test-page/index.html and it loads the page and changes the url to .../test-page/index.html then I can go directly to .../test-page/ and it loads fine. .../test-page still fails however.

How do I get my CDN/S3 configuration to serve the .../path/index.html file whether the url is .../path or .../path/? Do I need to set up specific routing rules? That seems excessive to force a bunch of redirects (.../path > .../path/index.html > .../path/)...

It worked when I originally set it up, so could this be an issue with my Gatsby build instead? When I run gatsby develop locally, I'm able to access it by going to .../page, so I don't think the build would be the issue...

UPDATE

I ended up solving it with a Lambda Edge function, but I am still curious if that is a required step with the CDN - S3 set up with these types of Static Site configurations

1 Answer
0

Did you try to set a default root object on CloudFront Distribution level?

It should do exactly what you want.

The object (file name) to return when a viewer requests the root URL (/) instead of a specific object.

Additionally, if you will really need a Function to fix this problem, you should consider using CloudFront Function instead of Lambda@Edge. It's cheaper and faster :) more you can find here.

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MG
answered 2 years ago
  • yup, I have my default root object set to index.html which is why I was a bit confused why it suddenly stopped working.

    I'll check out the CloudFront Function instead, thanks!

  • I think the default root object works only for the root domain <my-cdn>.cloudfront.net or <my-cdn>.cloudfront.net/, that's why if you are trying <my-cdn>.cloudfront.net/test-page it is not working.

    There are two things:

    • If your index.html on S3 is in the folder like test-page/index.html then you need to have the same structure in the default root object -> test-page/index.html
    • If you want to serve index.html under <my-cdn>.cloudfront.net/test-page then I believe that you need to use Function.

    You can find an example of how the default root object works here.

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