How to configure S3 Bucket Root Document with CloudBerry Explorer

Note: this post applies to CloudBerry Explorer freeware 2.7 and later.

As always we are trying to stay on top of the new functionality offered by Amazon S3  to offer the most compelling Amazon S3 and CloudFront client on Windows platform.

Amazon has released a set of S3 features that allow customers to host their entire website on Amazon S3. The newer version of CloudBerry Explorer freeware comes with a full support for those features.

AWS customers commonly serve image and video content out of S3, but they typically do not host their html content out of S3.  The biggest issue was that when someone hosted a website out of their S3 bucket, and a user accessed the root of the website (i.e. www.example.com), the default S3 bucket behavior is to list the contents of the bucket.   Customers who host websites want to return a root document (i.e.www.example.com/index.html). 

This release allows for customers to configure their bucket to support returning an index document both at the root directory as well as subdirectories within their bucket (i.e.www.example.com/directory).  This release also includes support for HTML errors and a custom error document.

With the newer release of CloudBerry Explorer you can easily configure your bucket with Root and Custom Error documents. Just right click the bucket and select Root Document from the context menu.

Then specify the names of the files. Make sure they exist in the bucket:

  

To utilize these features, customers will need to configure their bucket and then use a new set of S3 Website endpoints for referencing their content. For example, bucket.s3-website-us-west-1.amazonaws.com is a new website endpoint that would be used instead of bucket.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com.

As always we would be happy to hear your feedback and you are welcome to post a comment.

CloudBerry S3 Explorer is a Windows freeware product that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://cloudberrylab.com/

CloudBerry S3 Explorer PRO is a Windows program that helps managing Amazon S3 storage and CloudFront . You can download it at http://pro.cloudberrylab.com/ It is priced at $39.99  

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