How to Configure SSL for Amazon S3 bucket

Question

You can access your files via SSL like this:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/bucket_name/images/logo.gif

If you use a custom domain for your bucket, you can use S3 and CloudFront together with your own SSL certificate (or generate a free one via Amazon Certificate Manager): http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/custom-ssl-domains/

Custom domain SSL certs were just added today for $600/cert/month. Sign up for your invite below: http://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/custom-ssl-domains/

Update: SNI customer provided certs are now available for no additional charge. Much cheaper than $600/mo, and with XP nearly killed off, it should work well for most use cases.

@skalee AWS has a mechanism for achieving what the poster asks for, "implement SSL for an Amazon s3 bucket", it's called CloudFront. I'm reading "implement" as "use my SSL certs," not "just put an S on the HTTP URL which I'm sure the OP could have surmised.

Since CloudFront costs exactly the same as S3 ($0.12/GB), but has a ton of additional features around SSL AND allows you to add your own SNI cert at no additional cost, it's the obvious fix for "implementing SSL" on your domain.

I found you can do this easily via the Cloud Flare service.

Set up a bucket, enable webhosting on the bucket and point the desired CNAME to that endpoint via Cloudflare... and pay for the service of course... but $5-$20 VS $600 is much easier to stomach.

Full detail here: https://www.engaging.io/easy-way-to-configure-ssl-for-amazon-s3-bucket-via-cloudflare/

If you really need it, consider redirections.

For example, on request to assets.my-domain.example.com/path/to/file you could perform a 301 or 302 redirection to my-bucket-name.s3.amazonaws.com/path/to/file or s3.amazonaws.com/my-bucket-name/path/to/file (please remember that in the first case my-bucket-name cannot contain any dots, otherwise it won't match *.s3.amazonaws.com, s3.amazonaws.com stated in S3 certificate).

Not tested, but I believe it would work. I see few gotchas, however.

The first one is pretty obvious, an additional request to get this redirection. And I doubt you could use redirection server provided by your domain name registrar — you'd have to upload proper certificate there somehow — so you have to use your own server for this.

The second one is that you can have urls with your domain name in page source code, but when for example user opens the pic in separate tab, then address bar will display the target url.

It is not possible directly with S3, but you can create a Cloud Front distribution from you bucket. Then go to certificate manager and request a certificate. Amazon gives them for free. Ones you have successfully confirmed the certification, assign it to your Cloud Front distribution. Also remember to set the rule to re-direct http to https.

I'm hosting couple of static websites on Amazon S3, like my personal website to which I have assigned the SSL certificate as they have the Cloud Front distribution.

As mentioned before, you cannot create free certificates for S3 buckets. However, you can create Cloud Front distribution and then assign the certificate for the Cloud Front instead. You request the certificate for your domain and then just assign it to the Cloud Front distribution in the Cloud Front settings. I've used this method to serve static websites via SSL as well as serve static files.

For static website creation Amazon is the go to place. It is really affordable to get a static website with SSL.