AWS S3 Redirect only works on bucket as a subdomain not bucket as a directory

Question

Many people have received 100s of links to PoCs that are on an internal facing bucket and the links are in this structure.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name/

I added a redirect using AWS's Static website hosting section in Properties and it ONLY redirects when the domain is formatted like this:

https://bucket_name.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com

Is this a bug with S3?

For now, how do I make it redirect using both types of links? My current workaround is to add a meta redirect tag in each html file.

Answer 1

The s3-website is the only endpoint that supports redirects unfortunately. Using the s3.amazonaws.com supposes that you will be using S3 as a storage layer, instead of a website. If the link is to a specific object, you can place an HTML file at that url with a JS redirect, but other than that there is really no way to achieve what you are trying to do.

In the future, i would recommend always setting up a Cloudfront distribution for those kinds of usecases, as that will allow you to change the origin later on.