Edit url for non static (website) s3 bucket? - amazon-web-services

Question

I have created a S3 bucket named "test.download.abc.com". The purpose of this bucket is to simply serve the executables (exes) when a user clicks on a link Download to download the file. Here the href attribute as one can see is "https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/test.download.abc.com/MyFolder/MyClient.exe"
My intention here is to change the url that the user sees on hover to "http://test.download.abc.com/MyFolder/MyClient.exe" - one way of achieveing it is to have this url on the href and redirect it to the download file on click- which is working.
I would like to know if there is any record set "Cname" or "Alias" that I can create on the "Route 53" of AWS to achieve the same. I read about virtual hosting articles for which the bucket needs to be configured as a static site- which doesn't seem right for my purpose in addition to not having default site page. What is the right approach for me to achieve the same? Thank you all.

Answer 1

The solution here is deceptively simple.
All you need to do is set up the hostname in your DNS servers as a CNAME referencing the bucket's REST endpoint virtual hostname.
For a bucket named "bucket.example.com," in the "example.com" DNS zone, add:
bucket IN CNAME bucket.example.com.s3.amazonaws.com.
[...] the bucket for the request is the lowercase value of the Host header, and the key for the request is the Request-URI. This interpretation is useful when you have registered the same DNS name as your bucket name and have configured that name to be a CNAME alias for Amazon S3
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/VirtualHosting.html
This is not the same as static web site hosting. It's using a CNAME to reference the REST endpoint of the bucket directly. This, of course, only works for subdomains, since a CNAME doesn't belong at the apex of a domain.

Answer 2

If you don't want to go the static site route, you can setup a cloudfront distribution that serves the content of your s3 bucket, and then setup a custom name.
More here:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/CNAMEs.html
In CloudFront, an alternate domain name, also known as a CNAME, lets
you use your own domain name (for example, www.example.com) for links
to your objects instead of using the domain name that CloudFront
assigns to your distribution. Both web and RTMP distributions support
alternate domain names.
When you create a distribution, CloudFront returns a domain name for
the distribution, for example:
d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net
When you use the CloudFront domain name for your objects, the URL for
an object called /images/image.jpg is:
http://d111111abcdef8.cloudfront.net/images/image.jpg
If you want to use your own domain name, such as www.example.com,
instead of the cloudfront.net domain name that CloudFront assigned to
your distribution, you can add an alternate domain name to your
distribution for www.example.com. You can then use the following URL
for /images/image.jpg:
http://www.example.com/images/image.jpg

Answer 3

CloudFront is not required to meet your requirement, you can just enable S3 to serve static web content as described here
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/HowDoIWebsiteConfiguration.html
You would also need to configure Route 53 with a CNAME or A alias record to your bucket
See this sample that combine S3 and Route 53 : http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/website-hosting-custom-domain-walkthrough.html