How to change http response code on an object in Amazon S3 - amazon-s3

Question

I have a webpage hosted on Amazon S3 but I don't want the http response code to be 200. The page is a maintenance page that I'll redirect traffic to when I take our main website down for maintenance.
I want the Amazon S3 page to include a response header of:
HTTP/1.1 503 Service unavailable
Amazon give the ability to add some metadata to the S3 Object but there is nothing for the http status code.
Is it possible?

Answer 1

Not sure which browsers, or crawlers, that supports this. But you could potentially use the meta http-equiv status meta tag to accomplish this.
<meta http-equiv="status" content="503 Service Unavailable" />
The specification says to treat it in the same way as if 503 had been sent as the status code.

Answer 2

I believe you can get Cloudfront to do this. I haven't tested it yet, but try this:
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudFront/latest/DeveloperGuide/custom-error-pages.html

Answer 3

You cannot customize the status code for S3 responses.
You can use API Gateway as a proxy to your S3 website error page where you can customize status codes returned.

Answer 4

Until Amazon allow a custom status code from S3, here is a workaround using nginx.
We watch for the existence of a specific file, that acts as a "ON switch" for maintenance mode. If found, we proxy_pass requests to S3 - The trick is to return 503 but redirect processing of 503 status codes to a nginx "named location".
Example nginx conf file (just the relevant bits shown):
server {
...
# Redirect processing of 503 status codes to a nginx "named location".
error_page 503 #maintenance;
# "Maintenance Mode" is off by default - Use a nginx variable to track state.
set $maintenance off;
# Switch on "Maintenance Mode" if a certain file exists.
if (-f /var/www/app/maintenanceON) {
set $maintenance on;
}
if ($maintenance = on) {
# For Maintenance mode Google recommend using status code: "503 Service unavailable".
return 503;
}
...
location #maintenance {
# Redirect the request to a static maintenance page hosted in Amazon S3.
# Note: Use proxy_pass instead of rewrite so we keep the 503 code (otherwise nginx serves a 302 code)
rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.html break;
proxy_pass http://bucketname.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com;
}
}