How can I provide directory listings for those viewing my Amazon S3 based static website?

Question

I have an Amazon S3 account where I would like to store several directories of files.

I would like a visitor to this site to be able to see and download the files and folders I have placed there.

These files and folders will change regularly and I would prefer not to have to rewrite any html each time I added or removed files.

How can I arrange for the viewers of my site to be presented with a simple list of files/ folders?

Stabilize

Answer 1

You can use Javascript to list the files.

Here is the solution provided by Amazon:

http://aws.amazon.com/code/Amazon-S3/1713

You place list.html in every directory you want to list.

I have made my own listing file that provides a collapsible tree view:

https://github.com/phatmann/jS3Tree/blob/master/index.html

Neither of these files will work if you are using the S3 website feature.

Barbusse

doesnt seem to work. both.get empty page, despite all files public and not running as website bucket. – Corbett

@devdude, can you turn on Javascript debugging to see if the script is failing anywhere? – Barbusse

Firebug: response is null handleList()list.html (line 104) [Break On This Error] filex = response.getElementsByTagName('Contents'); – Corbett

Didn't worked for me neither, Rufus Pollock's solution worked well – Appassionato

Answer 2

I've created a simple bit of JS that creates a directory index in HTML style that would fit what you are looking for: https://github.com/rgrp/s3-bucket-listing

You can install this either directly into your s3 bucket or into a separate website (thanks to the fact that the S3 REST API supports CORS!). The README has full instructions on this: https://github.com/rgrp/s3-bucket-listing

Skellum

Answer 3

you should use the Amazon S3 API to list the buckets and files within them
a bucket can represent a folder (will be easier than using prefix's on the file name)

after creating your buckets and uploading the files to them
you can present the buckets on a page with a List All My Buckets request
once a user clicks on a given bucket you can get the files in it using a List Bucket request
another last click on the file to generate a url for the object so the user can download it without wasting your bandwidth

you can find many implementations to the amazon s3 api here

Ganda

Are these APIs callable from Javascript? Any samples? otherwise I'm not sure how I'd use them from within a browser. I was hoping for something I could serve up from within the S3 space. – Stabilize