How do you set a default root object for subdirectories for a statically hosted website on Cloudfront?

How do you set a default root object for subdirectories on a statically hosted website on Cloudfront? Specifically, I'd like www.example.com/subdir/index.html to be served whenever the user asks for www.example.com/subdir. Note, this is for delivering a static website held in an S3 bucket. In addition, I would like to use an origin access identity to restrict access to the S3 bucket to only Cloudfront.

Now, I am aware that Cloudfront works differently than S3 and amazon states specifically:

The behavior of CloudFront default root objects is different from the behavior of Amazon S3 index documents. When you configure an Amazon S3 bucket as a website and specify the index document, Amazon S3 returns the index document even if a user requests a subdirectory in the bucket. (A copy of the index document must appear in every subdirectory.) For more information about configuring Amazon S3 buckets as websites and about index documents, see the Hosting Websites on Amazon S3 chapter in the Amazon Simple Storage Service Developer Guide.

As such, even though Cloudfront allows us to specify a default root object, this only works for www.example.com and not for www.example.com/subdir. In order to get around this difficulty, we can change the origin domain name to point to the website endpoint given by S3. This works great and allows the root objects to be specified uniformly. Unfortunately, this doesn't appear to be compatable with origin access identities. Specifically, the above links states:

Change to edit mode:

Web distributions – Click the Origins tab, click the origin that you want to edit, and click Edit. You can only create an origin access identity for origins for which Origin Type is S3 Origin.

Basically, in order to set the correct default root object, we use the S3 website endpoint and not the website bucket itself. This is not compatible with using origin access identity. As such, my questions boils down to either

1. Is it possible to specify a default root object for all subdirectories for a statically hosted website on Cloudfront?

2. Is it possible to setup an origin access identity for content served from Cloudfront where the origin is an S3 website endpoint and not an S3 bucket?

Solution 1:

There IS a way to do this. Instead of pointing it to your bucket by selecting it in the dropdown (www.example.com.s3.amazonaws.com), point it to the static domain of your bucket (eg. www.example.com.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com):

Thanks to This AWS Forum thread

Solution 2:

Activating S3 hosting means you have to open the bucket to the world. In my case, I needed to keep the bucket private and use the origin access identity functionality to restrict access to Cloudfront only. Like @Juissi suggested, a Lambda function can fix the redirects:

'use strict';

/**
 * Redirects URLs to default document. Examples:
 *
 * /blog            -> /blog/index.html
 * /blog/july/      -> /blog/july/index.html
 * /blog/header.png -> /blog/header.png
 *
 */

let defaultDocument = 'index.html';

exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {
    const request = event.Records[0].cf.request;

    if(request.uri != "/") {
        let paths = request.uri.split('/');
        let lastPath = paths[paths.length - 1];
        let isFile = lastPath.split('.').length > 1;

        if(!isFile) {
            if(lastPath != "") {
                request.uri += "/";
            }

            request.uri += defaultDocument;
        }

        console.log(request.uri);
    }

    callback(null, request);
};

After you publish your function, go to your cloudfront distribution in the AWS console. Go to Behaviors, then chooseOrigin Request under Lambda Function Associations, and finally paste the ARN to your new function.

Solution 3:

There is an "official" guide published on AWS blog that recommends setting up a Lambda@Edge function triggered by your CloudFront distribution:

Of course, it is a bad user experience to expect users to always type index.html at the end of every URL (or even know that it should be there). Until now, there has not been an easy way to provide these simpler URLs (equivalent to the DirectoryIndex Directive in an Apache Web Server configuration) to users through CloudFront. Not if you still want to be able to restrict access to the S3 origin using an OAI. However, with the release of Lambda@Edge, you can use a JavaScript function running on the CloudFront edge nodes to look for these patterns and request the appropriate object key from the S3 origin.

Solution

In this example, you use the compute power at the CloudFront edge to inspect the request as it’s coming in from the client. Then re-write the request so that CloudFront requests a default index object (index.html in this case) for any request URI that ends in ‘/’.

When a request is made against a web server, the client specifies the object to obtain in the request. You can use this URI and apply a regular expression to it so that these URIs get resolved to a default index object before CloudFront requests the object from the origin. Use the following code:

'use strict';
exports.handler = (event, context, callback) => {

    // Extract the request from the CloudFront event that is sent to Lambda@Edge
    var request = event.Records[0].cf.request;

    // Extract the URI from the request
    var olduri = request.uri;

    // Match any '/' that occurs at the end of a URI. Replace it with a default index
    var newuri = olduri.replace(/\/$/, '\/index.html');

    // Log the URI as received by CloudFront and the new URI to be used to fetch from origin
    console.log("Old URI: " + olduri);
    console.log("New URI: " + newuri);

    // Replace the received URI with the URI that includes the index page
    request.uri = newuri;

    // Return to CloudFront
    return callback(null, request);

};

Follow the guide linked above to see all steps required to set this up, including S3 bucket, CloudFront distribution and Lambda@Edge function creation.