While we continue to improve our website, one of the things that was getting really annoying was this "beautiful" error page that AWS shows when navigating to nonexistent pages:
AWS S3 default 400 error page
We wished there was some Middleman extension that allowed us to configure the bucket's Error Document, but there isn’t. We then found that middleman-s3_sync, the gem we used for deploying, depends on fog-aws - and that one was able to configure the custom 404 page!
We jumped into the middleman-s3_sync gitter channel, just to check if there was any strong reason why they haven't integrated integrated that functionality into the extension - and there wasn’t. So we coded it, and now middleman-s3_sync supports specifying which page to show for any 400 error . It also allows you to customise which path to use as directory index, the good old index.html default.
If you want to set a custom 404 page in your Middleman site hosted on Amazon S3, update your Gemfile to use the 3.3.4 version of the gem:
gem 'middleman-s3_sync', '~> 3.3.4'
There's still no 4.x version of the gem with this changes, but they were merged into master, too - so you can include gem 'middleman-s3_sync', github: 'fredjean/middleman-s3_sync', branch: 'master' until @freadjean cuts a new release.
Then, add something like this in your config.rb:
activate :s3_sync do |s3_sync|
s3_sync.bucket = @s3[:bucket]
s3_sync.region = @s3[:region]
# ...
s3_sync.index_suffix = 'index.html' # the default, but maybe you want to change it
s3_sync.error_document = '404.html'
end
And be sure there's actually a page at $YOUR_SITE/404.html - ie, use page '404.html', directory_index: false if needed.
And that's it!
You can now brag about your lovely 404 page!
If you were looking for ideas about how to make a nice looking 404 page - you can tell I'm not the best one to ask:
My custom-404-page best try
Thanks $DEITY we have a great designer in our staff - and just people with common sense, for that matter - so we'll have a better 404 page than that.
That's what's so lovely about open source - the extension almost worked for us, and we could fill the gap so it now perfectly fits our needs. You can do it, too - keep on forking in a free world!