I have a React app hosted on an S3 bucket. The code is minified using yarn build (it's a create-react-app based app). The build folder looks something like:
build
├── asset-manifest.json
├── favicon.ico
├── images
│ ├── map-background.png
│ └── robot-icon.svg
├── index.html
├── js
│ ├── fontawesome.js
│ ├── packs
│ │ ├── brands.js
│ │ ├── light.js
│ │ ├── regular.js
│ │ └── solid.js
│ └── README.md
├── service-worker.js
└── static
├── css
│ ├── main.bf27c1d9.css
│ └── main.bf27c1d9.css.map
└── js
├── main.8d11d7ab.js
└── main.8d11d7ab.js.map
I never want index.html to be cached, because if I update the code (causing the hex suffix in main.*.js to update), I need the user's next visit to pick up on the <script src> change in index.html to point to the updated code.
In CloudFront, I can only seem to exclude paths, and excluding "/" doesn't seem to work properly. I'm getting strange behavior where I change the code, and if I hit refresh, I see it, but if I quit Chrome and go back, I see very outdated code for some reason.
I don't want to have to trigger an invalidation on every code release (via CodeBuild). Is there some other way? I think one of the challenges is that since this is an app using React Router, I'm having to do some trickery by setting the error document to index.html and forcing an HTTP status 200 instead of 403.
If you never want index.html to be cached, set the Cache-Control: max-age=0 header on that file only. CloudFront will make a request back to your origin S3 bucket on every request, but it sounds like this is desired behavior.
If you're wanting to set longer expiry times and invalidate the CloudFront cache manually, you can use a * or /* as your invalidation path (not / as you have mentioned). This can take up to 15 minutes for all CloudFront edge nodes around the world to reflect the changes in your origin however.