Wrong Content-Type when using Amazon Simple Storage Server (S3) as Web Hosting

I recently added RSS/Atom feeds to this website and I realised that the Content-Type header in the HTTP response is not set properly. This might cause some issues with your website not working properly, e.g. the RSS feed not showing properly in Firefox, a web browser that has support for RSS feeds. So I investigated this issue and I realised that Amazon S3 is a pretty dumb web server. You’ve got to set the Content-Type for each of your uploaded files. Of course this is definitely a deal breaker for me if I can’t find a way to automate it.

I have been using s3sync.rb to help me sync the changes for the website to an Amazon S3 bucket, that is setup to host my website. It works like rsync but for Amazon S3. You can instruct s3sync.rb to set the correct MIME type for the Content-Type header during file upload by configuring the mime.types file (check the README.txt for s3sync.rb for more info), like below:

text/html       html
text/css        css
text/javascript js
text/xml        xml
image/jpeg      jpg
image/png       png

If you already have existing files in Amazon S3, just delete all of them (you can automate that with some bash 1 liners) and then re-upload them with s3sync.rb after you’ve setup the mime.types file and you’re done!