Trouble Wiring Up an Amazon S3 Bucket to a CNAME Entry

Jason and I were setting up an internal static website using an S3 bucket a couple of days ago and wanted to point a more friendly domain name at it.

We initially called our bucket ‘static-site’ and then created a CNAME entry using zerigo to point our sub domain at the bucket.

The mapping was something like this:

our-subdomain.somedomain.com -> static-site.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

When we tried to access the site through our-subdomain.somedomain.com we got the following error:

<Error>
<Code>NoSuchBucket</Code>
<Message>The specified bucket does not exist</Message>
<BucketName></BucketName>
<RequestId></RequestId>
<HostId>

A bit of googling led us to this thread which suggested that we needed to ensure that our bucket was named after the sub domain that we wanted to serve the site from.

In this case we needed to rename our bucket to ‘our-subdomain.somedomain.com” and then our CNAME entry to:

our-subdomain.somedomain.com -> our-subdomain.somedomain.com.s3-website-eu-west-1.amazonaws.com

And then everything was happy.