S3 static website hosting: redirect all paths to index.html

Question

I'm using S3 to host a JavaScript application that will use HTML5 PushStates. The problem is that if the user bookmarks any URL, it won't resolve to anything. What I need is to be able to accept all url requests and serve the root index.html in my S3 bucket, rather than just do a full redirect. My JavaScript application can then parse the URL and serve the correct page.

Is there a way to tell S3 to serve index.html for all URL requests instead of redirecting? This is similar to setting up apache to handle all incoming requests by serving a single index.html, as shown in this example: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10647521/1762614. I'd really like to avoid running a webserver just to handle these routes. It's very tempting to do everything from S3.

Answer 1

With the help of CloudFront, this problem can be easily solved without URL hack.

• Create S3 bucket, for example: react
• Create a CloudFront distribution with the following settings:
  • Default root object: index.html
  • Source domain name: S3 bucket domain, for example: react.s3.amazonaws.com
• Go to the Error Page tab and click Create Custom Error Response:
  • HTTP Error Codes: 403: Forbidden (404: Not Found, if S3 static website)
  • Custom error response: Yes
  • Response page path:/index.html
  • HTTP response code: 200: OK
  • ClickCreate