Methods for accessing a bucket

You can access your bucket using the Amazon S3 console. Using the console UI, you can perform almost all bucket operations without having to write any code.

If you access a bucket programmatically, Amazon S3 supports RESTful architecture in which your buckets and objects are resources, each with a resource URI that uniquely identifies the resource.

Amazon S3 supports both virtual-hosted–style and path-style URLs to access a bucket. Because buckets can be accessed using path-style and virtual-hosted–style URLs, we recommend that you create buckets with DNS-compliant bucket names. For more information, see Bucket restrictions and limitations.

Note

Virtual-hosted-style and path-style requests use the S3 dot Region endpoint structure (s3.Region), for example, https://my-bucket.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com. However, some older Amazon S3 Regions also support S3 dash Region endpoints s3-Region, for example, https://my-bucket.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com. If your bucket is in one of these Regions, you might see s3-Region endpoints in your server access logs or AWS CloudTrail logs. We recommend that you do not use this endpoint structure in your requests.

Virtual-hosted–style access

In a virtual-hosted–style request, the bucket name is part of the domain name in the URL.

Amazon S3 virtual-hosted–style URLs use the following format:

https://bucket-name.s3.region-code.amazonaws.com/key-name

In this example, DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET1 is the bucket name, US West (Oregon) is the Region, and puppy.png is the key name:

https://DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET1.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/puppy.png

For more information about virtual hosted style access, see Virtual-hosted–style requests.

Path-style access

In Amazon S3, path-style URLs use the following format:

https://s3.region-code.amazonaws.com/bucket-name/key-name

For example, if you create a bucket named DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET1 in the US West (Oregon) Region, and you want to access the puppy.jpg object in that bucket, you can use the following path-style URL:

https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/DOC-EXAMPLE-BUCKET1/puppy.jpg

For more information, see Path-style requests.

Important

Update (September 23, 2020) – To make sure that customers have the time that they need to transition to virtual-hosted–style URLs, we have decided to delay the deprecation of path-style URLs. For more information, see Amazon S3 Path Deprecation Plan – The Rest of the Story in the AWS News Blog.

Accessing an S3 bucket over IPv6

Amazon S3 has a set of dual-stack endpoints, which support requests to S3 buckets over both Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) and IPv4. For more information, see Making requests over IPv6.

Accessing a bucket through S3 access points

In addition to accessing a bucket directly, you can access a bucket through an access point. For more information about the S3 access points feature, see Managing data access with Amazon S3 access points.

S3 access points only support virtual-host-style addressing. To address a bucket through an access point, use the following format.

https://AccessPointName-AccountId.s3-accesspoint.region.amazonaws.com

Note

• If your access point name includes dash (-) characters, include the dashes in the URL and insert another dash before the account ID. For example, to use an access point named finance-docs owned by account 123456789012 in Region us-west-2, the appropriate URL would be https://finance-docs-123456789012.s3-accesspoint.us-west-2.amazonaws.com.

• S3 access points don't support access by HTTP, only secure access by HTTPS.

Accessing a bucket using S3://

Some AWS services require specifying an Amazon S3 bucket using S3://bucket. The following example shows the correct format. Be aware that when using this format, the bucket name does not include the AWS Region.

S3://bucket-name/key-name

For example, the following example uses the sample bucket described in the earlier path-style section.

S3://mybucket/puppy.jpg