AWS cloudfront not updating on update of files in S3

Question

I created a distribution in cloudfront using my files on S3. It worked fine and all my files were available. But today I updated my files on S3 and tried to access them via Cloudfront, but it still gave old files.

What am I missing ?

Answer 1

Just ran into the same issue. At first I tried updating the cache control to be 0 and max-age=0 for the files in my S3 bucket I updated but that didn't work.

What did work was following the steps from @jpaljasma. Here's the steps with some screen shots.

First go to your AWS CloudFront service.

Then click on the CloudFront distrubition you want to invalidate.

Click on the invalidations tab then click on "Create Invalidation" which is circled in red.

In the "object path" text field, you can list the specific files ie /index.html or just use the wildcard /* to invalidate all. This forces cloudfront to get the latest from everything in your S3 bucket.

Once you filled in the text field click on "Invalidate", after CloudFront finishes invalidating you'll see your changes the next time you go to the web page.

Note: if you want to do it via aws command line interface you can do the following command

aws cloudfront create-invalidation --distribution-id <your distribution id> --paths "/*"

The /* will invalidate everything, replace that with specific files if you only updated a few.

To find the list of cloud front distribution id's you can do this command aws cloudfront list-distributions

Look at these two links for more info on those 2 commands:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/cloudfront/create-invalidation.html

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/cloudfront/list-distributions.html