how to update webpages of site hosted on aws s3?

Question

After hosting website on s3, how can we make changes in text in its webpages. I deleted older html files from bucket and uploaded new files by same name with updated text in the code. But no changes were reflected after refreshing those webpages.

Is there is any other way to update webpages of a website already hosted on s3 ? If so would somebody please post steps here to make those updates ? TIA.

Answer 1

I notice you have CloudFront in your tags so that is most likely the issue. When you upload a file to S3, CloudFront won't know about it right away if it's an existing file. Instead it's set to a default of 24 hours where it checks your origin (in this case your S3 bucket) to see if any changes have been made and if it needs to update the cache. There are a few ways to make it update the cache for those files:

• Using files with versions in their names, and updating links. The downside is that you have to make more changes than normal to get this to work.
• Invalidating the cache. This is not what Amazon recommends, but is nonetheless a quick way to make the cache pickup new changes right away. Note that there can be charges if you do a lot of invalidations:

No additional charge for the first 1,000 paths requested for invalidation each month. Thereafter, $0.005 per path requested for invalidation

• Using Behaviors:

Here is where you can assign a path (individual file, folders, etc.) and adjust certain properties. One of them is the TTL(Time To Live) of the path in question. If you make the TTL a smaller value CloudFront will pickup changes more quickly. However since you have an S3 origin note that you'll have to deal with request allocations. Also CloudFront will need some time to distribute these changes to all the edge servers.

Hope this helps.