An AWS static hosting workaround

After writing a short article yesterday about static hosting on AWS, a couple people ¹ tipped me off that a workaround for the lack of index documents is instead generate “pretty URIs” by creating extensionless files and forcing their content type to text/html when uploading them to S3.

The static generator I was using at the time (Hugo) didn’t support creating files without an extension, but I ended up writing my own pretty minimal replacement Go script and it worked like a charm. My upload to S3 is now two phases: one to send up HTML content and force its type, and a second to upload assets (CSS, images, JS) where content type is detected normally. Using the official AWS CLI, that looks like this:

# HTML
aws s3 sync ./public/ s3://$S3_BUCKET/ --acl public-read --content-type text/html --delete --exclude 'assets*'

# Assets (CSS, images, JS)
aws s3 sync ./public/assets/images/ s3://$S3_BUCKET/assets/images/ --acl public-read --delete

This works because S3 remembers the content type of an object that’s uploaded to it, and will serve the file with that same type on subsequent requests. It may not be a perfectly ideal design, but it works.