Amazon S3 downloads index.html instead of serving

Question

I've set up Amazon S3 to serve my static site, speakeasylinguistics.com. All of the DNS stuff seems to be working okay, because dig +recurse +trace www.speakeasylinguistics.com outputs the correct DNS info.

But when you visit the site in a browser using the endpoint, the index.html page downloads, instead of being served. How do I fix this?

I've tried Chrome, Safari, FF. It happens on all of them. I used Amazon's walkthrough on hosting a custom domain to a T.

Answer 1

Running curl -I against the url you posted gives the following result:

curl -I http://speakeasylinguistics.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
x-amz-id-2: DmfUpbglWQ/evhF3pTiXYf6c+gIE8j0F6mw7VmATOpfc29V5tb5YTeojC68jE7Rd
x-amz-request-id: E233603809AF9956
Date: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 07:58:55 GMT
Content-Disposition: attachment
Last-Modified: Sun, 18 Aug 2013 07:05:20 GMT
ETag: "eacded76ceb4831aaeae2805c892fa1c"
Content-Type: text/html
Content-Length: 2585
Server: AmazonS3

This line is the culprit:

Content-Disposition: attachment

If you are using the AWS console, I believe this can be changed by selecting the file in S3 and modifying its meta data by removing this property.

Answer 2

If you are using Hashicorp Terraform you can specify the content-type on an aws_s3_bucket_object as follows

resource "aws_s3_bucket_object" "index" {
  bucket = "yourbucketnamehere"
  key = "index.html"
  content = "<h1>Hello, world</h1>"

  content_type = "text/html"
}

This should serve your content appropriately in the browser.

Edit 24/05/22: As mentioned in the comments on this answer, Terraform now has a module to help with uploading files and setting their content-type attribute correctly