As I’ve stated in previous posts, I currently use CloudFlare as my CDN. There are several reasons for this that I won’t go into now. One of the “ToDo’s” on my list has been to clear CloudFlare’s cache when I upload new content to my blog. I was finally able to spend some time and get that done.

CloudFlare API

To start things off I reviewed the doc for the CloudFlare API. I use the personal free features of CloudFlare, so I chose to purge the entire cache every time instead of individual files. Paying to purge cache though has some great features such as utilizing tags.

CloudFlare issues 2 API keys (a Global and Origin CA key). In this case I needed the Global API key. To make a call I also needed the Zone ID, which can be found on the account homepage. This key provides access to most of my CloudFlare account, so securing the key was crucial. I decided to place this key in AWS’s System Manager Parameter Store.

IAM Policy

Being that the keys are in the parameter store I needed to add an IAM policy. It’s a simple policy that just allows the ssm:GetParameter/s options. I attached it to the role I used for the Lambda script.

{
    "Version": "2012-10-17",
    "Statement": [
        {
            "Sid": "VisualEditor0",
            "Effect": "Allow",
            "Action": [
                "ssm:GetParameters",
                "ssm:GetParameter"
            ],
            "Resource": "*"
        }
    ]
}

Lambda Script

My Lambda script is currently triggered by a stage in the Code Pipeline objects being deployed into S3 (this did not work as intended). It logs to CloudWatch and sends an email upon completion.

I tried to use environment variables where I could to keep the script itself clean.

The script itself is relatively basic. I added a few comments just to be thorough.

As with the rest of my AWS services I added a tag to the script and the Parameter Store entry in order to keep track of what is what. It makes for a good view in the Resource Manager. I might try my hand at turning most of this into a CloudFormation template at some point as well.

My script currently does not return the proper values to CodePipeline, so CodePipeline will wait until it times out even if successful. I will update this post and script once I complete that. Or, if you have the solution already, feel free to comment!

My script has been updated and this now works!