Single Page App + Amazon S3 + Amazon CloudFront + Prerender.io - how to set up?

Question

1. I have single page app built with Backbone.js.
2. I host app (app consists of static files only) on Amazon S3.
3. I use CloudFront as a Bucket CDN.
4. App is accessed by https://myapp.com -> https://abcdefgh34545.cloudfront.com -> https://myBucket.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html

How I can use Prerender.io service with this stack? I have to somehow detect that WebSpider/WebRobot is accessing the page and redirect it to prerender.io...

Answer 1

It's hard to use Prerender.io with a static Amazon S3 site.

You could stand up an nginx/apache server in front of s3: https://myapp.com -> https://mynginx-server.com -> https://myBucket.s3-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/index.html

This solution is less ideal because you lose the closest-location benefit of cloudfront.

This is a good article about a custom solution: http://www.dave.cx/post/23/prerendering-angular-s3/

David was able to generate the static HTML and save them in S3, then use CloudFlare to detect _escaped_fragment_ in the URL and redirect it to the static HTML on S3.