Redirect root domain to www in aws route 53 without S3

Question

I want to redirect my root domain to www.domain.com. The site is published using s3 CloudFront and route53.

I have seen a lot of docs on how to redirect using s3, but I cannot do it because there's already a bucket with my root domain somewhere. So I cannot create a bucket with my root domain as the name. Also, I doubt whether this s3 redirection will work for the https request.

I haven't seen any blog on redirecting without using the s3 bucket.

So how can I redirect an HTTP/https root domain to www subdomain in aws.

Answer 1

You cannot redirect using Route 53 (it is a DNS configuration service afterall, whereas redirects are a HTTP operation).

If you cannot use S3, another solution could be to use use CloudFront with a Lambda@Edge function.

If the hostname is not the www domain you could perform the redirect to the www domain.

The function might look similar to the below

def lambda_handler(event, context):
 
    request = event["Records"][0]["cf"]["request"]
    response = event["Records"][0]["cf"]["response"]
    # Generate HTTP redirect response with 302 status code and Location header.
    
    if request['headers']['host'][0]['value'] != 'www.example.com':
     
        response = {
            'status': '302',
            'statusDescription': 'Found',
            'headers': {
                'location': [{
                    'key': 'Location',
                    'value': 'https://www.example.com/{}' .format(request['uri'])
                }]
            }
        }
     
    return response