Configuring any CDN to deliver only one file no matter what url has been requested

Question

I am currently working on a new project where the entire page should be implemented in HTML5/JS working against an API/JSON. Since the entire application should only consist of one HTML file (index.html) and a JS MVC application (maybe backboneJs) I am thinking about SEO and user friendly urls.

There I came across

window.document.pushstate('','title','/url');

With the help of that html5 feature I can define URLs without really leaving or reloading the page. BUT... I want to deploy the application into a CDN like Amazon CloudFount for performance reason and low expenses. I would not need any server infrastructure (besides the one I need for the API of course)

So can I configure a CDN (really any CDN like AWS, Azure, Akamai) to provide the same HTML file no matter what URL is called

http://www.example.com => delivers index.html

http://www.example.com/any_subpage => delivers index.html

and so on ...

an working example you can find at http://html5.gingerhost.com. But the creator of that page may use an .htaccess file or something familiar to map everything to the same file. I want to provide the same functionality in a CDN.

Answer 1

Any CDN should have the capability of defining an origin server. This server gets contacted by the CDN to serve the file if the edge location doesn't have it.

The good news is that the origin server can be anything that serves web pages, such as Apache, Nginx, etc. This means that you can apply any kind of rewriting rules you wish.

If you don't wish to set up the origin server yourself, you could look at hosting your (static) site on S3. Recently they have introduced web redirects which may help you to to serve the same file under a different "alias". Failing that, you could look at redefining the standard error document, but I'm not sure whether an error status code will still be sent.