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To set up a static site on S3 with DNS on Route53, we have two options.

If we want the users to type www.example.com and have that auto-replaced in the address bar by example.com, we would do the following.

  • On S3: we set two buckets, one for example.com and the other for www.example.com. We "Redirect all requests" from www.example.com to example.com while the latter has "Enable website hosting" and of course the actual files.
  • On Route53: At the hosted zone for example.com, we get two Record Sets already made: one NS and the other SOA. We set a third, an Alias Record Set with Name: example.com and set the Value to the one offered by the UI. We also set a fourth, a CNAME, with Name: www.example.com and Value: example.com.

That works!

Suppose now that we want to do the converse.

If we want the users to type example.com and have that auto-replaced in the address bar by www.example.com, I expected that the following would be the recipe.

  • On S3: we set two buckets, one for example.com and the other for www.example.com. We "Redirect all requests" from example.com to www.example.com while the latter has "Enable website hosting" as well as the actual files.
  • On Route53: At the hosted zone for example.com, we get two Record Sets already made: one NS and the other SOA. We set a third, an Alias Record Set with Name: www.example.com and set the Value to the one offered by the UI.

This doesn't work.

What am I missing?

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    Using a CNAME here, with two buckets, is a situation that is wrong, even though it works, for now, only because your buckets are in the same region and served by common hardware within S3. Both records should be A-record ALIASes to their respective buckets, no matter which direction you want the redirection to go. A future change to bucket DNS sharding by S3 could make that CNAME invalid if your buckets were served from different clusters within the S3 region.
    – Michael - sqlbot
    Jun 13, 2015 at 4:14
  • Thanks for the comment. I could already see a peculiarity. The address bar for both Firefox and Chrome duly reflected the redirection either way, but Safari showed the target URL only for the Alias redirection, not for the CNAME redirection (all on OS X). After switching the Record Set to an Alias, Safari's address bar now reflects the redirection.
    – Calaf
    Jun 13, 2015 at 14:03

1 Answer 1

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You're missing the Alias record set for example.com that points to the S3 bucket example.com which contains the redirect.

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