Change of the Contentful asset domain

Published on December 8, 2017

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We have an important technical announcement to make. On March 4, 2018, Contentful will be changing the domain from which your assets are served. It's a change that will have little effect on most of our users, but it might require some additional steps if you are accessing Contentful through a secure proxy or have a security policy in place.

This change is designed to better isolate your content from potentially malicious content uploaded by other users. Once the change takes place, all user-generated assets (images, videos, PDFs, executable files, and other attachments) will be served from the ctfassets.net domain:

  • images.contentful.com → images.ctfassets.net

  • assets.contentful.com → assets.ctfassets.net

  • downloads.contentful.com → downloads.ctfassets.net

  • videos.contentful.com → videos.ctfassets.net

At the same time, we will also implement HTTP/2, which leads to a lot of performance improvements.

After March 4, 2018, we will force the old domains to redirect to the new domains with a permanent redirect (301). Your existing links should continue to work automatically in your browser. If you're using an asset URL to directly access user-generated content via curl, wget, or http libraries, be sure to configure that tool to follow these redirects. Bear in mind that in the long run, the best solution is to configure that tool to query the new domain.

You will also need to update your settings if any of the following apply to your case:

  • You filter outgoing requests (i.e., use a web proxy) → Configure your app to fetch media from the new domain

  • Your site uses a Content Security Policy → Add the new domain to the policy

  • Your app/site relies on stored asset and image links (i.e., you run a static website) → Rebuild the site to use the links to the new domain

As always, you can reach out to us at any time with your questions regarding this change. We're here to help.

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Meet the authors

Anthony Stanton

Anthony Stanton

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Contentful

Anthony is a former Senior Staff Software Engineer at Contentful, focused on application hosting and content delivery infrastructure.

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