I'm using Amazon's CloudFront to serve static files of my web apps.
Is there no way to tell a cloudfront distribution that it needs to refresh it's file or point out a single file that should be refreshed?
Amazon recommend that you version your files like logo_1.gif, logo_2.gif and so on as a workaround for this problem but that seems like a pretty stupid solution. Is there absolutely no other way?
As of March 19, Amazon now allows Cloudfront's cache TTL to be 0 seconds, thus you (theoretically) should never see stale objects. So if you have your assets in S3, you could simply go to AWS Web Panel => S3 => Edit Properties => Metadata, then set your "Cache-Control" value to "max-age=0".
This is straight from the API documentation:
To control whether CloudFront caches an object and for how long, we recommend that you use the Cache-Control header with the max-age= directive. CloudFront caches the object for the specified number of seconds. (The minimum value is 0 seconds.)
If you have boto installed (which is not just for python, but also installs a bunch of useful command line utilities), it offers a command line util specifically called cfadmin or 'cloud front admin' which offers the following functionality:
Usage: cfadmin [command]
cmd - Print help message, optionally about a specific function
help - Print help message, optionally about a specific function
invalidate - Create a cloudfront invalidation request
ls - List all distributions and streaming distributions
You invaliate things by running:
$sam# cfadmin invalidate <distribution> <path>
Go to CloudFront.
Click on your ID/Distributions.
Click on Invalidations.
Click create Invalidation.
In the giant example box type * and click invalidate
Done
