Dynamic content from cloudfront - can I put API results (JSON) from Rails?

Question

I see that CloudFront supports dynamic content.

Could anyone guide how I could go about doing this in Rails? For instance, I have, api.test.com/popular.json which I would like to be served from CloudFront preferably, but probably update itself every few hours.

For static assets, I have been able to do it using Rails asset_host setting. But I have not been able to find enough guides on dynamic content. Any pointers would be useful.

Answer 1

You don't need to integrate your rails app with CloudFront. Instead, you can set up CloudFront to cache your website:

1. Go to AWS Console and add a new CloudFront distribution
   • web delivery method
   • origin domain name: myexistingdomain.com

You can leave all defaults as they are. Minimum/Default/Maximum TTL options can be set to enforce a certain cache time, and might be necessary depending on your server settings.

2. at myexistingdomain.com, you must set Access-Control-Allow-Originheader to include the domain name of your Cloudfront distribution.

As you probably already have experienced, most updates on CloudFront, or adding an origin usually takes ~20 minutes, so be patient.

Also, if you need to use query parameters, cookies or special headers at your rails app, you'll have to include those in cache settings at your CloudFront distribution. Note that this will reduce the efficiency of the distribution.