As far I understand, custom origin server with cloudfront only works if cloudfront is able to access files from my website url:
eg: www.domain.com/hello.html
However, my website has a login requirement in order to view hello.html. How can I have the login mechanism and still cache my real hello.html page in cloudfront using custom origin server?
I am using Ruby on Rails btw, but this is applicable to other stacks as well.
I'm pretty sure this is not possible. As you said, CloudFront has be to able to access the file to serve and cache it. I never saw an option to tell CloudFront to use a password to access the file.
An idea: maybe you can check in your Rails app, before you require the user to enter a password, if the request comes from CloudFront (I'm sure there are some headers indicating that) and, if so, bypass the login requirement?
Edit:
It says in the docs:
Do not configure your origin server to request client authentication.
One thing I'm pretty sure set though is the User Agent. Check for user_agent =~ /cloudfront/iand bypass authentication?