Gatsby site hosted on AWS Amplify redirecting to homepage always

Problem Statement

After connecting the app for continuous deployment by attaching the branch on my github repository (For those interested, details here: Connecting to AWS Amplify for deployment), any specific url provided was always getting redirected to my home page (./index.html)

Rewrites and Redirects

You Need to sign in to AWS account by clicking on on https://aws.amazon.com/amplify/. Once the credentials are provided. Click on Rewrites and redirects

Default entries

There were 3 default entries and was suspecting one of them was causing this issue, but wasn't certain.

[
    {
        "source": "https://narenvadapalli.com",
        "target": "https://www.narenvadapalli.com",
        "status": "302",
        "condition": null
    },
    {
        "source": "/<*>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "404-200",
        "condition": null
    },
    {
        "source": "</^[^.]+$|\\.(?!(css|gif|ico|jpg|js|png|txt|svg|woff|ttf|map|json)$)([^.]+$)/>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "200",
        "condition": null
    }
]

Approach

I could have spent time and understood the redirects by studying the regex closely, but even simpler was to remove one by one (starting with the most suspected) and trying.

Attempt 1

First removed the second entry which felt like it was grabbing all the entries after my website's url.

    {
        "source": "/<*>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "404-200",
        "condition": null
    },

which didn't help and pages were still getting redirected

Attempt 2

Removed the last entry

    {
        "source": "</^[^.]+$|\\.(?!(css|gif|ico|jpg|js|png|txt|svg|woff|ttf|map|json)$)([^.]+$)/>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "200",
        "condition": null
    }

and saved the updated entries

and suddenly the specific urls were sticking without redirection to my homepage ( ./index.html)

So found the culprit

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Bonus research

• As per https://moz.com/learn/seo/redirection, seems like 301 redirection is preferred in terms for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) rather than 302 for the redirection of URL with and without www
• The second rule there was to catch any urls that point to an invalid/non-existing page. So I had a 404.html in my static website and was to redirect to that page, rather than my homepage ( ./index.html`)

So finally the working combination of Rewrites and Redirects is

[
    {
        "source": "https://narenvadapalli.com",
        "target": "https://www.narenvadapalli.com",
        "status": "301",
        "condition": null
    },
    {
        "source": "/<*>",
        "target": "/index.html",
        "status": "404-200",
        "condition": null
    }
]

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