[Question] Redirect to localhost for application authentication debugging about cloudfront-authorization-at-edge

[ottokruse]

Interesting question 👍

To route traffic to your developer laptop, you need to have it as your CloudFront origin, instead of the S3 bucket. The line of code you refer to just reads the host from the CloudFront event meta data, changing it there won't work (it's meant to be read not altered).

I think an approach that might work is (but is not trivial):

• Setup a throw away EC2/LightSail/Cloud9 environment where you develop and run your web app in development/hot-reload mode
• Make that environment publicly available so CloudFront can route to it (expose port 8080 to public internet. It will have some random URL that people would not guess hopefully - but if you really only want to allow traffic from CloudFront you're going to have to set a secret header in CloudFront, and check that in your dev server)
• Use your EC2/LightSail/Cloud9 environment as origin to CloudFront, instead of the S3 bucket. (that would require you to change the auth-edge CloudFront distribution after deploying)

VS Code has great features for remote developing against e.g. an EC2: https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/remote-overview

You could also use your dev laptop instead of EC2/LightSail/Cloud9 but that would be more scary to expose to public internet than a throw away dev environment.

[rpattcorner]

That sounds promising, thanks!