How can I get Cloudfront to cache the resulting content of a Rails redirect

Question

I have an endpoint in my Rails app where a model id and a couple other parameters form the URL. From there, I look up that model in the DB, and redirect to an image stored on Amazon S3.

Cloudfront is ALWAYS in front of this url, and I really want it to cache the image. Right now, it's caching the redirect, which means it's serving straight from the S3 bucket which is not as efficient.

What can I do? Is there a header I can add to tell Cloudfront to cache the result? Or is there a way I can use Rack::Rewrite but still have access to my ActiveRecord models?

Answer 1

Ultimately the only solution that worked was to change the original S3 URL's. I moved all the logic that computed the URL by model id and other parameters like I described to the S3 image generation. That way my frontend could still generate these urls. Then I set up a Cloudfront URL mapped to the S3 bucket itself and pointed my app to that for image urls.