Routing traffic to an Amazon API Gateway API by using your domain name

You can use Amazon API Gateway to create, publish, maintain, monitor, and secure APIs. You can create APIs that access AWS services or other web services in addition to data stored in the AWS Cloud.

The method that you use to route domain traffic to an API Gateway API is the same regardless of whether you created a regional API Gateway endpoint or an edge-optimized API Gateway endpoint.

• Regional API endpoint: You create a Route 53 alias record that routes traffic to the regional API endpoint.

• Edge-optimized API endpoint: You create a Route 53 alias record that routes traffic to the edge-optimized API. This causes traffic to be routed to the CloudFront distribution that's associated with the edge-optimized API.

An alias record is a Route 53 extension to DNS that's similar to a CNAME record. For a comparison of alias and CNAME records, see Choosing between alias and non-alias records.

Note

Route 53 doesn't charge for alias queries to API Gateway APIs or other AWS resources.

Prerequisites

To get started, you need the following:

• An API Gateway API that has a custom domain name, such as api.example.com that matches the name of the Route 53 record that you want to create.

  For more information, see the following topics:

  • Setting up custom domain names for HTTP APIs in the Amazon API Gateway Developer Guide.

  • Setting up custom domain names for REST APIs in the Amazon API Gateway Developer Guide.

  • Setting up custom domain names for WebSocket APIs in the Amazon API Gateway Developer Guide.

• A registered domain name. You can use Amazon Route 53 as your domain registrar or you can use a different registrar.

• Route 53 as the DNS service for the domain. If you register your domain name by using Route 53, we automatically configure Route 53 as the DNS service for the domain.

  For information about using Route 53 as the DNS service provider for your domain, see Making Amazon Route 53 the DNS service for an existing domain.

Configuring Route 53 to route traffic to an API Gateway endpoint

To configure Route 53 to route traffic to an API Gateway endpoint, perform the following procedure.

To route traffic to an API Gateway endpoint

1. If you created the Route 53 hosted zone and the endpoint using the same account, skip to step 2.

   If you created the hosted zone and the endpoint using different accounts, get the target domain name for the custom domain name that you want to use:

   1. Sign in to the AWS Management Console and open the API Gateway console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/apigateway/.

   2. In the navigation pane, choose Custom domain names.

   3. Select the custom domain name that you want to use and get the value of API Gateway domain name.

2. Open the Route 53 console at https://console.aws.amazon.com/route53/.

3. In the navigation pane, choose Hosted zones.

4. Choose the name of the hosted zone that has the domain name that you want to use to route traffic to your API.

5. Choose Create record.

6. Specify the following values:

   Routing policy

   Choose the applicable routing policy. For more information, see Choosing a routing policy.

   Record name

   Enter the domain name that you want to use to route traffic to your API.

   The API that you want to route traffic to must include a custom domain name, such as api.example.com that matches the name of the Route 53 record.

   Alias

   If you are using the Quick create record creation method, turn on Alias.

   Value/Route traffic to

   Choose Alias to API Gateway API, then choose the Region that the endpoint is from.

   How you specify the value for Endpoint depends on whether you created the hosted zone and the API using the same AWS account or different accounts:

   • Same account – The list of target domain names includes only APIs that have a custom domain name that matches the value that you specified for Record name. Choose the applicable value.

   • Different accounts – Enter the value that you got in step 1 of this procedure.

   Record type

   Choose A – IPv4 address.

   Evaluate target health

   For control over DNS failover, configure custom health checks. For an example, see Configure custom health checks for DNS failover in the API Gateway user guide.

7. Choose Create records.

   Changes generally propagate to all Route 53 servers within 60 seconds. When propagation is done, you'll be able to route traffic to your API by using the name of the alias record that you created in this procedure.