Remove trailing slash on Eleventy S3 hosted sites using Cloudfront function

Intro

This article will walk through the steps required to create a Cloudfront function to handle redirecting trailing slash URIs to non-trailing slash equivalents on your S3 hosted 11ty website.

Background

Several years ago we published our website at Si Novi using a hand-balled static site generator we built for ourselves, and deployed it to S3 with Cloudfront used for caching and routing our A record from Route 53.

For this old website we wanted to strip trailing slashes on URLs, so https://example.com/articles/some-article instead of https://example.com/articles/some-article/, personal preference I guess.

Anyway, to achieve this we used a Lamda@Edge function to handle the redirects for us - 301 redirecting from the trailing slash URI to the non-trailing slash URI - something we'd long achieved using .htaccess on an Apache server.

We published this function to the AWS Serverless Application Repository.

Fast forward a few years, and we now publish our website using Eleventy - still hosted on S3, still fronted with the Cloudfront CDN, but our long-standing redirect function no longer worked.

With 11ty we were hitting a redirect loop which we believe was due to it's use of subfolder index.html pages - our old hand-balled system created S3 objects like articles/some-article.html whereas Eleventy creates S3 objects like articles/some-article/index.html. The the old system resolved to the object correctly, whereas when using sub-directory within an index.html as 11ty and others do, this caused an infinite redirect loop.

Solution

1. Create a new CloudFront function

function handler(event) {
    var request = event.request;
    var uri = request.uri;

    var params = '';
    if(('querystring' in request) && (request.querystring.length > 0)) {
        params = '?'+request.querystring;
    }

    if(uri.endsWith('/')) {
        if(uri !== '/') {
            var response = {
                statusCode: 301,
                statusDescription: 'Permanently moved',
                headers:
                { "location": { "value": `${uri.slice(0, -1) + params}` } } // remove trailing slash
            }

            return response;    
        }


    }
    //Check whether the URI is missing a file extension.
    else if (!uri.includes('.')) {
        request.uri += '/index.html';
    }



    return request;
}

The above code achieves the same trailing slash removal as we had in our old Lambda@Edge function, but also includes an additional check to ensure that index.html is appended to any requests on their way to S3 (only if the request doesn't already include '.', so image/some-image.png will pass-through just fine ).

2. Publish the function

Save and publish your newly created function, in this example I've named it subfolder-index

3. Configure your Cloudfront distribution to route requests through the function

Modify your Cloudfront distribution's behaviour and set the published function to run on Viewer request.

Wrap up

That's it, you should now be seeing URLs redirected to your non-trailing slash URI preference, while still successfully serving the subfolder index.html file (which wont appear in the URL)

One benefit of using a Cloudfront function is it's cheaper to invoke than a Lambda@Edge function.

You can see our old Lambda@Edge function here, which still might be useful.

ps: If you're not hosting subfolder index.html files you can remove the else if from the Cloudfront function.

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