Resolving Error 403 AccessDenied in AWS CloudFront for Your S3 Static Site

As a data scientist, setting up a static site on your S3 instance can be an exciting achievement. But what if you begin to encounter an Error 403 AccessDenied when trying to access your site through CloudFront? This error can be quite frustrating and understanding why it’s occurring and how to resolve it can save you a lot of time and effort. This post aims to walk you through the necessary steps to troubleshoot and fix this common issue.

Understanding the Error 403 AccessDenied

Before getting started with the troubleshooting process, it’s important to understand what this error means. An Error 403 AccessDenied typically indicates that the request made was valid, but the server is refusing to respond to it because it does not have the necessary permissions to access the requested resource.

Troubleshooting Steps

Step 1: Check Your S3 Bucket Policy

Your S3 bucket policy is what defines who can access your bucket and what actions they can perform. The first step in resolving the Error 403 is to ensure that your bucket policy allows CloudFront to access your S3 bucket. Here is an example of such a policy:

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Id": "PolicyForCloudFrontPrivateContent",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "1",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "arn:aws:iam::cloudfront:user/CloudFront Origin Access Identity EAFQXXXXXXXX"
      },
      "Action": "s3:GetObject",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::your-bucket-name/*"
    }
  ]
}

Step 2: Enable Public Access

CloudFront serves your content to the public, hence, it’s essential that your S3 bucket allows public access. To do this, navigate to the ‘Permissions’ tab in your S3 bucket settings and turn off the ‘Block all public access’ option.

Step 3: Double Check Your CloudFront Origin Settings

Your CloudFront distribution’s origin settings are another crucial part of this puzzle. You need to ensure that the origin domain name matches your S3 bucket’s name and that the ‘Origin Access Identity’ is the same as the one you specified in your S3 bucket policy.

Step 4: Invalidate Your CloudFront Cache

After making changes to your S3 bucket or CloudFront settings, CloudFront may still be storing and serving the old version of your site. To make sure CloudFront fetches the latest version of your site from your S3 bucket, you’ll need to invalidate your CloudFront cache. You can do this by creating an invalidation request with the path set to ‘/*’.

Conclusion

By carefully following the above-mentioned steps, you should be able to solve the Error 403 AccessDenied when accessing your S3 static site via CloudFront. Understanding how to manage and troubleshoot your AWS services is key to maintaining your applications and becoming a more proficient data scientist.

Stay tuned for more technical guides and tips!

Tags: #AWS #Troubleshooting #CloudFront #S3Bucket

[Reference Link](!https://saturncloud.io/blog/troubleshooting-error-403-accessdenied-in-cloudfront-for-your-s3-static-site/)