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Validate your Lightsail distribution's content caching - Amazon Lightsail
Test your distribution

Validate your Lightsail distribution's content caching

In this guide, you will learn how to test that your Amazon Lightsail distribution is caching and serving content from your origin. You should perform this test after you add your registered domain name to your distribution. For more information about distributions, see Content delivery network distributions.

Test your distribution

Complete the following procedure to test your distribution. We use the Chrome web browser in this procedure; other browsers may use similar steps.

  1. Open the Chrome web browser.

  2. Open the Chrome Menu in the upper-right-hand corner of the browser window and select More Tools > Developer Tools.

    You can also use the shortcut Option + ⌘ + J (on macOS), or Shift + CTRL + J (on Windows/Linux).

  3. In the developer tools pane, choose the Network tab.

  4. Browse to the domain of your distribution (e.g., https://www.example.com).

    The Network tab of the Chrome developer tools should populate with a list of objects from your website.

  5. Choose a static object, such as an image file (.jpg, .png, .gif).

  6. In the Header panel that appears, you should see that the via header mentions CloudFront, and that the x-cache header shows Hit from cloudfront. A value of Hit from cloudfront confirms that your distribution served the object from its cache. If you instead see Miss from cloudfront, the object wasn't in the cache yet and was fetched from your origin; reload the page and check again, and the subsequent request should show a Hit.

    Distribution test result