Invalidate AWS CloudFront action

A GitHub Workflow Action for invalidating CloudFront distribution paths

Usage

- name: Invalidate CloudFront
  uses: chetan/invalidate-cloudfront-action@v2
  env:
    DISTRIBUTION: ${{ secrets.DISTRIBUTION }}
    PATHS: "/index.html"
    AWS_REGION: "us-east-1"
    AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
    AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}

See also a sample workflow which illustrates a static site build and deploy.

Configuration

Param	Required?	Description
PATHS	yes*	A list of one or more space-separated paths to invalidate
PATHS_FROM	yes*	Filename to read list of paths from
DISTRIBUTION	yes	CloudFront distribution ID to operate on, e.g., 'EDFDVBD6EXAMPLE'
AWS_REGION	yes	AWS Region to operate in
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID	yes	Access key with necessary permissions to invalidate objects in the target distribution (see below)
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY	yes	Secret key
DEBUG	no	When set to "1", prints the final awscli invalidation command for troubleshooting purposes

Note: either PATHS or PATHS_FROM is required. PATHS_FROM will overwrite PATHS if both are set.

See also: AWS CLI reference

Paths

Paths are passed directly to the aws cli create-invalidation command and so must be a proper space-separated list of paths. Examples:

PATHS=/index.html
PATHS=/ /index.html /foo/bar/baz

Alternatively, you can write the list of files to invalidate to a file which will then be slurped into the PATHS variable. This lets you use some other method to dynamically generate the list of files based on the commit, etc. Example workflow steps:

- name: checkout dist
  uses: actions/checkout@master
  with:
    ref: dist
    # need at least 2 here so we can get a proper log in next step
    fetch-depth: 2

- name: get updated files
  run: |
    # allow grep to fail
    set +e
    FILES=$(git log --stat="1000" -1 | grep '|' | awk '{print "/"$1}' | grep -e '\.html$')
    set -e
    [ -z "$FILES" ] && touch .updated_files && exit 0
    for file in $FILES; do
      echo $file
      # add bare directory to list of updated paths when we see index.html
      [[ "$file" == *"/index.html" ]] && echo $file | sed -e 's/\/index.html$/\//'
    done | sort | uniq | tr '\n' ' ' > .updated_files

- name: invalidate
  uses: chetan/invalidate-cloudfront-action@v2
  env:
    PATHS_FROM: .updated_files
    AWS_REGION: 'us-east-1'
    DISTRIBUTION: ${{ secrets.DISTRIBUTION }}
    AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID: ${{ secrets.AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID }}
    AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY: ${{ secrets.AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY }}

AWS Credentials

The recommended way to pass AWS credentials to your GitHub actions is to use OpenID Connect.

Once configured, you can use the aws-actions/configure-aws-credentials action to properly authentication and supply AWS credentials to subsequent steps in your workflow.

Note that your workflow will need the following permission when using OIDC:

permissions:
  id-token: write

For a complete example, see the workflow in this repository.

Also note that if you using the CloudFormation template from the aws repo above, the 'thumbprint' shown in the example is out of date. I've included a working template complete with the below IAM policy that should work out of the box (as of 2022-01-27).

As an alternative, you may directly pass an access/secret key pair. See the config section above.

AWS IAM Policy

In order to use this action, you will need to supply credentials which have, at minimum, the following permission:

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": "cloudfront:CreateInvalidation",
            "Resource": "arn:aws:cloudfront::<account id>:distribution/<distribution ID>"
        }
    ]
}

Self-hosted runners

A note regarding self-hosted runners:

V2 of the invalidate-cloudfront-action executes via a bash script on the runner and requires the following additional tools:

• jq 1.6
• aws 1.x+
• tr
• date
• wget

Please ensure that they are available on your system or use V1 of the action, which executes within a docker container.