CloudFront

CloudFront

LocalStack Pro supports creation of local CloudFront distributions, which allows you to transparently access your applications and file artifacts via CloudFront URLs like https://abc123.cloudfront.net.

For example, take the following simple example which creates an S3 bucket, puts a small text file hello.txt to the bucket, and then creates a CloudFront distribution which makes the file accessible via a https://abc123.cloudfront.net/hello.txt proxy URL (where abc123 is a placeholder for the real distribution ID):

$ awslocal s3 mb s3://bucket1
$ echo 'Hello World' > /tmp/hello.txt
$ awslocal s3 cp /tmp/hello.txt s3://bucket1/hello.txt --acl public-read
$ domain=$(awslocal cloudfront create-distribution \
   --origin-domain-name bucket1.s3.amazonaws.com | jq -r '.Distribution.DomainName')
$ curl -k https://$domain/hello.txt

Note: In order for CloudFront to be fully functional, your local DNS setup needs to be properly configured. See the section on configuring the local DNS server for details.

Note: In the code example above, the last command (curl https://$domain/hello.txt) may temporarily fail with a warning message Could not resolve host. This is due to the fact that operating systems use different DNS caching strategies, and it may take some time for the CloudFront distribution’s DNS name (e.g., abc123.cloudfront.net) to become available in the system. Usually after a few retries the command should work, though. Note that a similar behavior can also be observed in the real AWS - CloudFront DNS names can also take up to 10-15 minutes to propagate across the network.

Last modified July 26, 2022: fix cloudfront dns configuration link (#216) (c232272a)