Gatsby site hosted on AWS Amplify redirecting to homepage always

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Problem Statement

After connecting the app for continuous deployment by attaching the branch on my github repository (For those interested, details here: Connecting to AWS Amplify for deployment), any specific url provided was always getting redirected to my home page (./index.html)

Rewrites and Redirects

You Need to sign in to AWS account by clicking on on https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/. Once the credentials are provided. Click on Rewrites and redirects

Default entries

There were 3 default entries and was suspecting one of them was causing this issue, but wasn't certain.

[
    {
        "source": "https://narenvadapalli.com",
        "target": "https://www.narenvadapalli.com",
        "status": "302",
        "condition": null
    },
    {
        "source": "/<*>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "404-200",
        "condition": null
    },
    {
        "source": "</^[^.]+$|\\.(?!(css|gif|ico|jpg|js|png|txt|svg|woff|ttf|map|json)$)([^.]+$)/>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "200",
        "condition": null
    }
]

Approach

I could have spent time and understood the redirects by studying the regex closely, but even simpler was to remove one by one (starting with the most suspected) and trying.

Attempt 1

First removed the second entry which felt like it was grabbing all the entries after my website's url.

    {
        "source": "/<*>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "404-200",
        "condition": null
    },

which didn't help and pages were still getting redirected

Attempt 2

Removed the last entry

    {
        "source": "</^[^.]+$|\\.(?!(css|gif|ico|jpg|js|png|txt|svg|woff|ttf|map|json)$)([^.]+$)/>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "200",
        "condition": null
    }

and saved the updated entries

and suddenly the specific urls were sticking without redirection to my homepage ( ./index.html)

So found the culprit

---

Bonus research

• As per https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection, seems like 301 redirection is preferred in terms for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rather than 302 for the redirection of URL with and without www
• The second rule there was to catch any urls that point to an invalid/non-existing page. So I had a 404.html in my static website and was to redirect to that page, rather than my homepage ( ./index.html`)

So finally the working combination of Rewrites and Redirects is


[
{
"source": "https://narenvadapalli.com",
"target": "https://www.narenvadapalli.com",
"status": "301",
"condition": null
},
{
"source": "/<*>",
"target": "/index.html",
"status": "404-200",
"condition": null
}
]


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