CODEWITHSUNDEEP
amazon-web-servicesflaskdnsamazon-elastic-beanstalk
Vatsal Kanakiya
Vatsal Kanakiya

Reputation: 25

Setting up AWS Beanstalk with Name.Com DNS - URL redirection doesn't work

I have a website www.example.com and it is hosted on elastic-beanstalk. I am using the name.com DNS servers. I have followed the steps in the following blogs to set up https and URL settings:

https://colintoh.com/blog/map-custom-domain-to-elastic-beanstalk-application https://medium.com/@jbesw/tutorial-adding-https-to-a-custom-domain-on-elastic-beanstalk-29a5617b8842

i.e

  1. Create a CNAME pointing www.example.com to the beanstalk
  2. Add a URL redirect for @.example.com to https://www.example.com

After this, the links www.example.com works, and http://example.com gets redirected to www.example.com.

But for a page inside the site, like www.example.com/about, just typing in http://example.com/about does not work and does not get redirected to www.example.com/about.

Most blogs suggest moving to AWS Route 53. Is that the only option?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 113

Answers (1)

alphazwest
alphazwest

Reputation: 4450

The issue, as you've found out, is that DNS-level redirects don't work on a page-specific level. At least, not without some extra magic happening in the background (which some registrars implement.)

Even if that setup did work, you'd still have some SEO issues to deal with. For example, you want the example.com > www.example.com redirect to (In any case I know of) to be a 301 redirect. This let's search engines like Google know "Use only the www version of this page please." Otherwise, you effectively have two pages floating around out there either of which (or both) could be indexed and considered duplicate content of one another.

Using the Route 53 servers is certainly an option but no one you have to use. The issue is that you need to do this on a server-level—not a DNS level.

On a server level, you can specify more complex and granular redirection rules such as "send any non-www, non-https traffic to the www, https version of the page and indicate this is a permanent preference (301)` that redirect (on an Apache server) would look like this:

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\. [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ https://www.{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI} [R=301,L,NE]

Quick Reference: NC means case-insensitive matching. R specifies the type of redirect (301 here), NE specifies to not escape characters like # or ? which are used in many URL schemes. For a full list of flags used during Apache RewriteRules, read this webpage.

There are different ways to achieve this for Apache, NGINX, and Windows Server. Amazon has a reference article detailing some of the implementation approaches for this. Copying the details of the article here is beyond the scope of your question IMO.

So, to answer your question: Route 53 isn't your only option. You can absolutely use whatever registrar or DNS host you'd like. The issue is that you need to re-think your approach entirely and focus on server-level rules rather than DNS-level rules. I'm no expert and find it annoying to do it this way, so hopefully, someone will jump in with a more insightful approach.

Upvotes: 1

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