In the time between when I read up on S3 redirects and when I published a post on what I had learned, Amazon created a second way to redirect parts of S3 websites.

The first way redirects a single URL at a time. These are the redirects I already knew about, which were introduced last October. They are created by attaching a special piece of metadata to an S3 object.

The second way was introduced in December, and redirects based on prefix. This is probably most useful for redirecting entire folders. You can either rewrite a folder name, preserving the rest of the URL, or redirect the entire folder to a single URL. This kind of redirect is created by uploading an XML document containing all of the redirect rules. You can create and upload the XML, without actually seeing any XML, by descending through boto’s hierarchy until you find boto.s3.bucket.Bucket.configure_website.