I'm hosting my static website on AWS S3, with Cloudfront as a CDN, and I'm wondering how I can get clean URLs working.
I currently have to go to example.com/about.html to get the about page. I'd prefer example.com/about as well as across all my other pages. Also, I kind of have to do this because my canonical URLs have been set with meta tags and search engines, and it's gonna be a bit much to go changing them.
Is there a setting in Cloudfront that I'm non seeing?
There are two options I've explored, one detailed by Matt below.
First is trimming .html off the file before uploading to S3 and then editing the Content Header in the http for that file. This might work beautifully, but I can't figure out how to edit content headers from the command line, where I'm writing my "push website update" bash script.
Second is detailled by Matt below and leverages S3's feature that recognizes root default files, usually index.html. Might be a great approach, but it makes my local testing challenging, and it leaves a trailing slash on the URLs which doesn't work for me.
Try AWS Lamda@Edge. It solves this completely.
First, create an AWS Lambda function and then attach your CloudFront as a trigger.
In the code section of this AWS Lamda page, add the snippet in the repository below.
https://github.com/CloudUnder/lambda-edge-nice-urls/blob/master/lambdaRewrite.js
Note the options in the readme section of the repo
When you host your website in S3 (and by extension CloudFront), you can configure S3 to have a "default" file to load when a directory is requested. This is called the "index document".
For example, you can configure S3 to load index.html as the default file. This way, if the request was for example.com/abc/, then it would load abc/index.html.
When you do this, if they requested example.com/abc/123.html, then it will serve up abc/123.html. So the default file only applies when a folder is requested.
To address your request for example.com/about/, you could configure your bucket with a default file of index.html, and put about/index.html in your bucket.
More information can be found in Amazon's documentation: Index Document Support.
You can overcome ugly urls by using a custom origin, when your S3 bucket is configured as a website endpoint, with your Cloudfront distribution. The downside is that you can't configure Cloudfront to use HTTPS to communicate between Cloudfront and your origin. You can still use HTTPS, just not end-to-end encryption.