How to format a URL to get a file from Amazon S3?

I am having some trouble figuring out how to access a file from Amazon S3. Lets say that the bucket that the file lives in is BUCKET_NAME, the file is FILE_NAME, etc. I have tried the following two URLs:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/BUCKET_NAME/FILE_NAME/
?Expires=EXPIRATION
&Signature=SIGNATURE
&SignatureVersion=2
&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA1
&AWSAccessKeyId=KEYID

But this gives me the following error:

<Code>NoSuchKey</Code>
<Message>The specified key does not exist.</Message>

I have also tried:

https://s3.amazonaws.com/BUCKET_NAME/
?Key=FILE_NAME
&Expires=EXPIRATION
&Signature=SIGNATURE
&SignatureVersion=2
&SignatureMethod=HmacSHA1
&AWSAccessKeyId=KEYID

but this returns a webpage with a list of all of the files in the given bucket (including FILE_NAME), instead of the specific file I want. I have also tried throwing in Action=GetObject into the URL as well but that doesn't seem to change anything.

It would be helpful to find out which (if any) is the proper method and what I am doing wrong. I have been digging through Amazon's documentation for a while now but I can't seem to sort it out.

Its actually formulated more like:

https://<bucket-name>.s3.amazonaws.com/<key>

See here

Documentation here, and I'll use the Frankfurt region as an example.

There are 2 different URL styles:

• Virtual host style: https://BUCKET.s3.amazonaws.com/FILE
• Path style: https://s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/BUCKET/FILE

But this url does not work:

• https://s3.amazonaws.com/BUCKET/FILE

The message is explicit: The bucket you are attempting to access must be addressed using the specified endpoint. Please send all future requests to this endpoint.

I may be talking about another problem because I'm not getting NoSuchKey error but I suspect the error message has been made clearer over time.

Perhaps not what the OP was after, but for those searching the URL to simply access a readable object on S3 is more like:

https://<region>.amazonaws.com/<bucket-name>/<key>

Where <region> is something like s3-ap-southeast-2.

Click on the item in the S3 GUI to get the link for your bucket.

As @stevebot said, do this:

https://<bucket-name>.s3.amazonaws.com/<key>

The one important thing I would like to add is that you either have to make your bucket objects all publicly accessible OR you can add a custom policy to your bucket policy. That custom policy could allow traffic from your network IP range or a different credential.

Note that if you're in a different AWS partition, such as US GovCloud or China then you'll have a slightly different URL pattern.

https://<bucket-name>.s3-<region-name>.amazonaws.com/<key> works for GovCloud.

China is something like https://<bucket-name>.s3-<region-name>.amazonaws.com.cn/<key>.