Question

Is there a way to make CloudFront support signed, private URLs to a Custom Origin server instead of Amazon S3?

The only documentation I can find on private CloudFront distributions assumes the use of an Amazon S3 bucket, not a custom origin server.

Answer 1

The answer is no. Here’s the official link.

For everyone else reading this, you can do it with S3 — as the poster mentions.

Here’s a snip from this page:

By default, files delivered through Amazon CloudFront are publicly readable by anyone on the Internet. However, if you require greater control over who can download or stream your files, you can use Amazon CloudFront’s private content feature. When this option is enabled, Amazon CloudFront will only deliver files or stream media when you say it is okay to do so by securely signing your requests. There is no additional charge for using the private content feature.

Here is the link to the page where you can learn how to create signed URLs using S3.

There are some plugins and code out there that will do this work for you.

1. Flow Player
2. AWSNinja link and link

But no — at the moment, you cannot do it with Custom Origin servers.