S3 bucket listing that’s easier on the eyes

Update: I learned that Shrub exists. It’s much nicer than what I hacked up in an hour!

This is just a quick one.

I host a lot of public files on an Amazon S3 bucket. It’s my main mechanism for publishing releases of my open-source software.

So I was amazed to discover recently that S3 doesn’t have an easy way to just… show all the files. Like, not even a basic directory listing, which you could easily get with an Apache server. Just nothing.

Well, that’s not entirely true. There is this ancient sample code from Amazon, made in 2008, that I found frozen in ice. But it looks like crap.

So I made a better one, using Bootstrap for styling. Below is a screenshot, and here it is in action.

To use it, just download the index.html file from the GitHub page and drop it into the root of your public S3 bucket. That’s it!

As an aside, isn’t it awesome how easy web development has become, thanks to modern tools like Bootstrap, JQuery, and Handlebars? That file from Amazon used 174 lines of Javascript, whereas mine is only 99. Of course I have three external dependencies, but I use CDNs, so you probably won’t notice a difference in performance. How cool is that?