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Comment by jaxondu | Hacker News Reader

Thinking of moving a static site to S3 + CloudFront + AWS Certificate Manager with the purpose of enabling HTTPS for the site. Seems like CloudFront does not support index document even if you've enabled it on S3 (https://tiffanybbrown.com/2016/01/aws-certificate-manager-s3...). You can't have URL such as https://example.com/about/. Instead need to specifically use URL https://example.com/about/index.html.

Will look into Netlify and Aerobatic next. Are there other PaaS/SaaS that makes it easy to host HTTPS static site generated from Jekyll/Hugo?

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I'm using index document paths on S3 + CloudFront right now, it's definitely possible. Unfortunately, I don't remember exactly what I did to make it work. Some more Googling might give you the answer.

Edit: the setting is called "Default Root Object" when setting up a CloudFront distribution with an S3 origin.

Are you doing HTTPS? According to the article, the problem exists when running over HTTPS.

Does that setting apply to any subdirectory? The article linked in a comment above states otherwise.

> Does that setting apply to any subdirectory? The article linked in a comment above states otherwise.

No, unfortunately it doesn't.

One workaround that I use is to upload files without an extension and explicitly set their content type as `text/html` in S3. So a request to `/about` just serves a file in your S3 bucket called `about`. This works with both CloudFront and S3.

I wrote about a few more details of the process here: https://brandur.org/fragments/aws-static-hosting-workaround

I use Kloudsec CDN to get HTTPS on my static sites. It's very easy to set up and free (certificates are from Let's Encrypt). You can use it for custom domains on GitHub pages as well.

https://www.kloudsec.com/

That is not true. This site is built with Hugo hosted on S3, running behind CloudFront and uses the AWS Certificate Manager:

https://owenconti.com/about/

Replying to myself as a follow up:

Make sure the S3 bucket is set to Static Website Hosting mode, and make sure your Index and Error documents are set appropriately. Then make sure your CloudFront distribution is pointed at the Website's endpoint and NOT the normal S3 endpoint.

That's exactly my configuration and works like a charm.

I initially had issues because I was pointing CloudFront at the normal S3 endpoint. Once that was solved, everything started working smoothly.

I use and like https://github.com/laurilehmijoki/s3_website.

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