How to set up static site in aws using S3 - is there a visual guide?

Question

There are a bunch of tutorials that go over:

• creating the public bucket
• updating DNS in Route 53
• Setting permissions and policies

But they all seem incomplete and there seem to be a large number of gotchas to know.

Is there a set of screenshots to help reveal some of the mysteries to those of us who love to learn visually ?

Answer 1

First create the bucket.
The name will need to be unique across aws so you may easily find your first choices is already taken.

For (a different) example I was able to use my initials as a prefix.

Configure options (below) - you can leave all these blank to get started !

Then find the 'Static Website Hosting' section:

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And allow public access:

i.e. Unchecking it (I haven't tested individual boxes)

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It's the first option for 'use this bucket to host a website'. Don't be confused by the Redirect requests, you'll deal with an a DNS alias for a redirect in Route53

Note that this is where you can see the S3 endpoint that you'll use in DNS / Route53 below.

OK so now for Route53 which was harder to find good examples.
Note that the names are generic
The key parts are:

• Adding the 'A' record (for IPv4)
• Point the alias to s3-website.us-east-2.amazonaws.com - and knowing that "website" is NOT replaced with your site name or anything. You literally use the that exact URL that I have (allowing for different regions).

For verification:

One more - here's the policy you need to add. A critical piece:

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One last gotcha - once you have the site working, when you go to update future content to the bucket you will see:

Know that you don't need to change that. You can leave it as the default and the content will be available on the site anyway: