Question

I was wondering if it’s possible to create my own error pages for my S3 buckets. I’ve got CloudFront enabled and I am using my own CNAME to assign the S3 to a subdomain for my website. This helps me create tidy links that reference my domain name.

When someone tries to access a file that has perhaps been deleted or the link isn’t quite correct, they get the XML S3 error page which is ugly and not very helpful to the user.

Is there a way to override these error pages so I can display a helpful HTML page instead?

Answer 1

If you configure your bucket as a ‘website’, you can create custom error pages.

For more details see the Amazon announcement of this feature and the AWS developer guide.

There are however some caveats with this approach, a major one being that your objects need to be publicly available.

It also works with Cloudfront, but the same public access limitations apply. See https://forums.aws.amazon.com/ann.jspa?annID=921.

If you want, you can try these out
right away by configuring your Amazon
S3 bucket as a website and making the
new Amazon S3 website endpoint a
custom origin for your CloudFront
distribution. A few notes when you do
this. First, you must set your custom
origin protocol policy to “http-only.”
Second, you’ll need to use a tool that
supports CloudFront’s custom origin
feature – the AWS Management Console
does not at this point offer this
feature. Finally, note that when you
use Amazon S3’s static website
feature, all the content in your S3
bucket must be publicly accessible, so
you cannot use CloudFront’s private
content feature with that bucket. If
you would like to use private content
with S3, you need to use the S3 REST
endpoint (e.g., s3.amazonaws.com).