Is there a way to have index.html functionality with content hosted on S3?

Question

Is there a way to make S3 default to an index.html page? E.g.: My bucket object listing:

/index.html
/favicon.ico
/images/logo.gif

A call to www.example.com/index.html works great! But if one were to call www.example.com/ we'd either get a 403 or a REST object listing XML document depending on how bucket-level ACL was configured.

So, the question: Is there a way to have index.html functionality with content hosted on S3?

Answer 1

Amazon S3 now supports Index Documents

The index document for a bucket can be set to something like index.html. When accessing the root of the site or a sub-directory containing a document of that name that document is returned.

It is extremely easy to do using the aws cli:

aws s3 website $MY_BUCKET_NAME --index-document index.html

You can set the index document from the AWS Management Console:

Answer 2

For people still struggling against this after 3 years, let me add some important information:

The URL for your website (and to which you have to point your DNS) is not

<bucket_name>.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com, but

<bucket_name>.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com.

If you use the first, it will not work as intended, no matter how much you config the Index document.

For a specific example, consider:

• http://www-example-com.s3.amazonaws.com/index.html works.
• http://www-example-com.s3.amazonaws.com/ fails with AccessDenied.
• http://www-example-com.s3-website-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/ works!

To get your true website address, go to your S3 Management Console, select the target bucket, then Properties, then Static Website Hosting. It will show the website URL that will work.

Answer 3

You can easily solve it by Amazon CloudFront link. At Amazon CloudFront you could modify the root object. You can download manager here: m1.mycloudbuddy.com/downloads.html.

Answer 4

Since It's been long time, this question being asked, and Amazon S3 changing their Interface. I would like to answer with updated screenshots.

We need to enable 'static web hosting' for S3 to serve as webhosting. - Go to Properties -> click on static web hosting -> Select 'use this bucket to host a website' - Enter the index document (index.html by default), error document and redirection rules, if any.

As answered in https://stackoverflow.com/a/24377823/3086531, webhosting link would be

http://bucket-name.s3-website-region.amazonaws.com

Answer 5

I would suggest reading this thread from 2006 (On Amazon web services developers connection). It seems there's no easy solution to this.

Answer 6

Yes. using AWS Cloudfront lets you assign a default file.

Answer 7

you can do it using dns webforwards and cloaking. just forward to the complete path of the index.html

www.example.com forwards to http://www.example.com.s3.amazonaws.com and make sure you cloak the output.