I’m trying to add a route 53 record set that points to my cloudfront distribution. However, when I select ‘create record set’ in route 53 and click the alias target in the subsequent panel, the cloud front distribution is not listed. All I get is ‘No targets available’. My Distribution has been created and is enabled (and is working). I have added a CName to my distribution with the same domain name that I’m setting up in Route53, but it still doesn’t show.
How do I get my distribution to show in the Alias Target field so that I can point a Route53 ‘a’ record to it?
Thanks
Combining several correct but incomplete answers:
Only A records and AAAA are supported. Not CNAME records.
The Route53 "Alias Target" box matches against CloudFront distributions' "Alternate Domain Names" field. If you're creating a new record set for something.example.com, you should have already set the alternate domain name for one of your distributions to something.example.com.
The Route53 Management Console can be slow, and it might not find your distribution right away — wait until the distribution status is Deployed.
Make sure you have set one or more Alternate Domain Names for you distribution, otherwise it won't be listed on the target combo for Route53 Alias.
As far as I understand, that's the same as configuring ServerAlias on your Apache's VirtualHost (or the correspondent for Nginx and so on). Without it, your requests wouldn't be identified as destined to that distribution when it gets there.
From AWS's documentation:
If you're using CloudFront to distribute your content, you can use Amazon Route 53 to route queries to your CloudFront distribution. The name of your Amazon Route 53 hosted zone (such as example.com) must match an alternate domain name in the CloudFront distribution. You cannot route queries to the CloudFront domain name for your distribution (such as d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net). The following procedure assumes that you have already registered the applicable domain names.
Make sure it's an A record rather than a CNAME record (weird, I know). I found that buried in the documentation here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/Route53/latest/DeveloperGuide/resource-record-sets-values-alias.html
If your distribution does not show as an alias target, you can always manually copy and paste the d123.cloudfront.net (replace d123.cloudfront.net with the actual DNS name of your distribution) in to the target. This will allow you to create the alias record.
Make sure your CloudFront distribution includes the name of your site (example.com )!
I was having the same issue and spent well over an hour trying to solve the problem...
TL/DR
Set your Origin ID in the origin in your Cloudfront Distribution to be the same as the domain name you are trying to create an alias for
More Detail
I struggled with this for some time.
In the end I compared a working CloudFront distribution which did show up in Route 53 with one that did not.
What I noticed was that the Origin Id specified in the origin for the distribution was not the domain name for my site.
This option is found in: CloudFront Distributions > [Id of distribution] > Origins and Origin Groups > Origins.
I only had one origin listed where the path was the name of a public s3 bucket. This entry also had an Origin ID field. When I updated this to be my domain name (without the www prefix) e.g. testdomain.com then I was able to see this cloud front distribution in the route 53 alias drop down.
You have to fill the Alternate Domain Names (CNAMEs) field e.g. use
www.my_site.com
*.my_site.com
For SSL Certificate field select
Custom SSL Certificate (example.com)
for this you will have to create and verify your domain with ACM, ACM has to be created in Virginia.
After that you will be able to see the Cloudfront in R53.
The trick was to enter the www before the domain because CloudFront matches against that alternate domain name with www or whatever subdomain you use. Type www or your subdomain and it will find the distribution.
It was taking forever for my cloudfront distribution status property to read deployed.
However inputting the cloudfront domain url into my address bar brought me to my website, aka the cloudfront domain url was live.
Feeling impatient, I copied this domain address and pasted it into the alias target field.
It worked!
Related
I have a simple site mysite.com served behind CloudFront distribution and maintenance.mysite.com single static page hosted on S3 also served behind CloudFront distribution.
I want to be able to switch between them on route53 level when my main site is not available, but CloudFront doesn't allow to have same domain name attached to the different distributions. As per docs https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/CNAMEs.html
Duplicate and overlapping alternate domain names
You cannot add an alternate domain name to a CloudFront distribution if the same alternate domain name already exists in another CloudFront distribution, even if your AWS account owns the other distribution.
What is the proper and fastest way to switch between main and backup pages on a route53 level?
I don't want extra load balancers / lambdas to be involved and DNS way is the preferable solution.
I think this depends on how you want to create www.mysite.com vs mysite.com. If, as you have in your diagram, all incoming requests are actually to mysite.com, then you can just have a CNAME* entry that points mysite.com to www. when that's up and running, and to maintenance. when it's in maintenance mode. However, if you want www. and mysite.com (with no subdomain) to both go to the same place and have that same place switch around, then you need to come up with another name for your production server. Then you can have
- prod.mysite.com
/
[www.mysite.com | mysite.com] -< CNAME* in Route53
\
- maintenance.mysite.com
CNAME is the standard DNS way to do this; however, I believe AWS charges for CNAME redirects and not for aliases, So, wherever I say CNAME above, you can actually create an A record in Route53, and then click on the "alias" switch and select "Alias to another record in this hosted zone".
There is no straightforward solution, so I'm posting workarounds from AWS support here as an answer
Workaround 1:
You need to have 2 CloudFront distributions. One of these would be “Blue” and the other, “Green”. The Blue distribution would need to have www.domain.com as the alternate domain name. Now, create a DNS record that points www.domain.com to the CloudFront distribution “Blue” which will act as Production environment now.
Moving on, add the CNAME *.domain.com to the CloudFront distribution "Green" (the other distribution).
Now, in this setup, a request to www.domain.com would land on the Blue Distribution, as it has www.domain.com as the ADN (which is more granular than *.domain.com). Now, when you want to make the “Green” distribution as production distribution, just remove the Alternate Domain Name from the "blue" distribution. In that case, there would be only one distribution that would satisfy the request for www.domain.com, the Green one (which has *.domain.com as ADN), and the request would be routed to that even if your DNS points www.domain.com to the Blue distribution (as CloudFront routes a request based on the Host header and will choose a distribution that has that domain as the ADN).
Workaround 2:
You need to have 2 CloudFront distributions. One of these would be “Blue” and the other, “Green”. Create a DNS record that points www.domain.com to the CloudFront distribution “Blue” which will act as Production environment now. Also, add www.domain.com as a CNAME(Alternate Domain Name) to the distribution “Blue”. Meanwhile you can test the other CloudFront distribution “Green”.
When you want to make the “Green” distribution as production distribution, you should first point the DNS record for www.domain.com to the CloudFront distribution “Green”. Even though the DNS points to the “Green” distribution, the request will still be routed to the “Blue" CloudFront distribution because “Blue” CloudFront distribution has the CNAME(Alternate Domain Name) for www.domain.com (CloudFront will try to route the request to a CloudFront distribution that has the same CNAME(Alternate Domain Name) value as the value of the host header). Wait for a few hours for the new DNS record to propagate. Then, remove the CNAME from CloudFront distribution “Blue” and add it immediately to the CloudFront distribution ”Green”. Now all the requests will be routed by CloudFront to the “Green” CloudFront distribution since the “Green” CloudFront distribution has the CNAME(Alternate Domain Name) www.domain.com.
This workaround would involve some downtime when you move the CNAME from the "blue" distribution to the "green" distribution, so I would recommend going with the first workaround only. Also, please test this on a test environment first before testing it on the production distributions.
I am getting stuck while trying to secure my S3 hosted website. The steps I have followed are:
I have created a custom domain with Route 53, hosted on S3.
Created an SSL certificate.
Created a CloudFront distribution and and set it to use my ssl certificate, and given my custom domain as the CloudFront "alternate domain name"
Created a public hosted zone for my domain.
Created "A" and "AAAA" records to link my domain to my CloudFront distribution.
However, I cannot access my website, either HTTPS or just HTTP. But I can access the website through the CloudFront Domain name just fine. Just not when I tried to access it through my custom domain name. (example.com)
You need to follow some steps to access your cloudfront distribution through a custom domain. Please check these 3 steps:
1 - Have you added a CNAME entry in cloudfront distribution as shown by the image below?
2 - All that you need in ROUTE53 is create an ALIAS entry pointing to your cloudfront distribution. Have you added this? If your settings are right, Route53 will give you the option of your distribution which matches with your domain. (Make Sure that you have set CNAME entry). Please refer to the image below:
3 - For last, please make sure that your SSL match with your domain.
I believe that you probably missing CNAME entry as described by step 1.
I'm totally new to Amazon and all of its services. I have set up Amazon S3 and created a CloudFront distribution but what I want is to give a custom domain name to this CloudFront distribution.
I have created a sub-domain on my server and changed the CNAME to the CloudFront distribution link but I can not access to my content on S3. Can anyone tell me full go through how I can set up with alternate domain names?
To give a custom domain name to an Amazon CloudFront distribution:
Provide an Alternate Domain Name when creating your CloudFront distribution
Create a CNAME record in Route 53 (or your own DNS provider) that points to the URL of your CloudFront distribution (eg d3i29vunzqzxrt.cloudfront.net), or create an A record in Route 53 that uses Alias = Yes and select the CloudFront distribution.
From the help tip in the CloudFront console:
If you want to use your own domain name (for example, www.example.com) instead of the CloudFront domain name (for example, d1234.cloudfront.net) for the URLs for your files, specify up to 100 CNAMEs. Separate CNAMEs with commas or put each on a new line. You also need to create a CNAME record with your DNS service to route queries for www.example.com to d1234.cloudfront.net.
Update: Since this release (Apr 8, 2019) when you add an alternate domain name to a distribution, you must also attach a SSL/TLS certificate to that distribution that covers the alternate domain name.
So, first of all make sure that after you registered the domain name with your domain provider (GoDadday, CloudFlare, Route 53 etc') and created a CNAME record
you should do the following:
Add an SSL/TLS certificate from an authorized certificate authority (for example - Let's Encrypt) to CloudFront that covers the domain name you plan to use with the distribution - to validate that you are authorized to use the domain. (Read more in here).
And only then update your distribution to add an alternate domain name:
Open Amazon CloudFront console -> General view -> Edit -> Alternate Domain Names (CNAMEs) -> enter the CNAME that you want to associate with the CloudFront distribution (for example www or home).
I think the guide is designed to have you spend more than you should. Instead, you should:
Add Alternate Domain Name as the guide says.
Create "A" record in Route 53, not CNAME. AWS will charge you for each CNAME request.
I want to have instead of example.ddns.net example.com as my domain.
I've registered my domain at Amazon AWS
My question: How can I setup that it does this.
I tried to make an CNAME record and entered as Value my ddns.net domain.
But it shows following error.
RRSet of type CNAME with DNS name example.com. is not permitted at apex in zone example.com.
You can never use a CNAME at the apex of a zone, e.g. for example.com. You can only use it for hosts in the zone, such as www.example.com.
Options:
(Simple)
Use www.example.com. Create the CNAME. This will work as expected. You can then use an empty S3 bucket named example.com (the bucket name must be exactly the same as your domain name) along with an Alias record, to create a redirect to www.example.com, described here.
(Really simple)
Use www.example.com as the CNAME, as above, and then create an A record with the IP address shown at the top of this page. This of course is a third party dependency, so, do your due diligence. (I am not affiliated with this company.)
(More complex, but guaranteed to impress your friends)
Create a CloudFront web distribution. Use example.com as the Alternate Domain Name¹ and use the ddns hostname as the Origin Host. Then, in Route 53, create example.com as an A record, set Alias to Yes, and select or type the dxxxexample.cloudfront.net hostname that was assigned to your domain when you created it. Wait until the distribution status in the CloudFront console shows "Deployed." Surf to your site at example.com.
You'll be paying for CloudFront in this scenario, of course, so be sure to familiarize yourself with that.
¹ Alternate Domain Name. The CloudFront documentation also refers to this field as a CNAME. Disregard that. It is apparently a case of an unfortunate dumbing-down of the documentation, presumably because the term CNAME is so often casually used in name-based virtual hosting, so they called it what people expect it to be called. Sometimes this value will correspond to a CNAME record, but obviously not this time.
I'm totally new to Amazon and all of its services. I have set up Amazon S3 and created a CloudFront distribution but what I want is to give a custom domain name to this CloudFront distribution.
I have created a sub-domain on my server and changed the CNAME to the CloudFront distribution link but I can not access to my content on S3. Can anyone tell me full go through how I can set up with alternate domain names?
To give a custom domain name to an Amazon CloudFront distribution:
Provide an Alternate Domain Name when creating your CloudFront distribution
Create a CNAME record in Route 53 (or your own DNS provider) that points to the URL of your CloudFront distribution (eg d3i29vunzqzxrt.cloudfront.net), or create an A record in Route 53 that uses Alias = Yes and select the CloudFront distribution.
From the help tip in the CloudFront console:
If you want to use your own domain name (for example, www.example.com) instead of the CloudFront domain name (for example, d1234.cloudfront.net) for the URLs for your files, specify up to 100 CNAMEs. Separate CNAMEs with commas or put each on a new line. You also need to create a CNAME record with your DNS service to route queries for www.example.com to d1234.cloudfront.net.
Update: Since this release (Apr 8, 2019) when you add an alternate domain name to a distribution, you must also attach a SSL/TLS certificate to that distribution that covers the alternate domain name.
So, first of all make sure that after you registered the domain name with your domain provider (GoDadday, CloudFlare, Route 53 etc') and created a CNAME record
you should do the following:
Add an SSL/TLS certificate from an authorized certificate authority (for example - Let's Encrypt) to CloudFront that covers the domain name you plan to use with the distribution - to validate that you are authorized to use the domain. (Read more in here).
And only then update your distribution to add an alternate domain name:
Open Amazon CloudFront console -> General view -> Edit -> Alternate Domain Names (CNAMEs) -> enter the CNAME that you want to associate with the CloudFront distribution (for example www or home).
I think the guide is designed to have you spend more than you should. Instead, you should:
Add Alternate Domain Name as the guide says.
Create "A" record in Route 53, not CNAME. AWS will charge you for each CNAME request.