Create a CloudFront distribution

Hub › AWS › Beginner › Create a CloudFront distribution

Goal

After this page you will have a CloudFront distribution in the InProgress state, pointing at your S3 bucket, with the distribution's domain name saved as $DIST.

Prerequisites

• CloudFront concepts
• Public S3 bucket

Use the console

CloudFront's create-distribution CLI form takes 30+ fields. The console fills sensible defaults for most. We'll use the console once, then go back to the CLI to fetch what we need.

1. Console search → CloudFront → Create distribution.
2. Origin domain: click the box and select your bucket. Pick the one with <bucket>.s3.<region>.amazonaws.com (the "website endpoint" entry is a different thing — don't pick that).
3. Origin access: select Public. This tier uses the public S3 endpoint you set up on page 09. (The other option, OAC, is covered in the advanced tier.)
4. Viewer protocol policy: pick Redirect HTTP to HTTPS.
5. Allowed HTTP methods: leave as GET, HEAD.
6. Cache policy: leave as the default (CachingOptimized).
7. Web Application Firewall: pick Do not enable security protections for this tier. (Free Tier doesn't include WAF.)
8. Default root object: type index.html. This makes the bare URL (no path) serve index.html.
9. Description: anything memorable, like beginner-site.
10. Click Create distribution.

You land on the distribution detail page. The Status column reads InProgress. The Distribution domain name column shows something like d1abc23def4ghi.cloudfront.net — that is your future public URL.

Save the distribution domain

From the terminal, grab the domain so the next page can curl it:

aws cloudfront list-distributions \
  --query "DistributionList.Items[?Comment=='beginner-site'].DomainName" \
  --output text

Output (yours will differ):

d1abc23def4ghi.cloudfront.net

Export it so the next page picks it up:

export DIST=d1abc23def4ghi.cloudfront.net

The distribution isn't ready yet. The next page waits for it to finish deploying.

Next → Wait for deploy