I decided to migrate my personal website from NickolasKraus.org to NickolasKraus.io. As I’ve written in the past,

It is generally considered best practice to never change the URL of a resource on the internet. This is because other resources may reference your resource and if the URL to your resource has changed these references will break.

Additionally, I did not want to nullify the PageRank I’d developed over the years.

To this effect, I needed to redirect all requests destined for NickolasKraus.org to NickolasKraus.io.

Naively, I assumed I could simply use a CNAME to map NickolasKraus.org to NickolasKraus.io. However, when testing this in the AWS Management Console, I received the following error:

Bad request.
(InvalidChangeBatch 400: RRSet of type CNAME with DNS name nickolaskraus.org. is not permitted at apex in zone nickolaskraus.org.)

After thinking through some possible solutions, I landed on the following:

You can redirect all requests to a website endpoint for a bucket to another bucket or domain. If you redirect all requests, any request made to the website endpoint is redirected to the specified bucket or domain.

Source

This feature of static website hosting with Amazon S3 facilitates redirection of requests from one domain to another. Notably, from one apex domain to another apex domain.

To accomplished this, I extended the Terraform module that I use for hosting static websites with the following:

resource "aws_s3_bucket_website_configuration" "s3_root" {
  count  = var.redirect_domain_name == "" ? 1 : 0
  bucket = aws_s3_bucket.s3_root.bucket

  index_document {
    suffix = "index.html"
  }

  error_document {
    key = "404.html"
  }
}

resource "aws_s3_bucket_website_configuration" "s3_root_redirect" {
  count  = var.redirect_domain_name != "" ? 1 : 0
  bucket = aws_s3_bucket.s3_root.bucket

  redirect_all_requests_to {
    host_name = var.redirect_domain_name
    protocol  = "https"
  }
}

When the redirect_domain_name is provided, the S3 bucket is configured to redirect requests to another domain (i.e. NickolasKraus.io).

NOTE: The code for this Terraform module can be found here:

• infrable-io/terraform-aws-static-website

After deploying NickolasKraus.io and configuring NickolasKraus.org for redirection, requests were dutifully redirected.

One small annoyance is that requests to https://nickolaskraus.org are routed to https://nickolaskraus.io/index.html. I think I can live with this small imperfection…