CloudFront distribution not showing as Route53 alias target

Question

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

Answer 1

Combining several correct but incomplete answers:

1. Only A records and AAAA are supported. Not CNAME records.
2. 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.
3. The Route53 Management Console can be slow, and it might not find your distribution right away — wait until the distribution status is Deployed.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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