# How to make your S3 buckets public

> Learn how to make your AWS S3 bucket publicly readable when the ACL settings do not work, by adding a bucket policy that allows s3:GetObject for everyone.

Author: [Flavio Copes](https://flaviocopes.com/about/) | Published: 2021-06-23 | Topics: [Services](https://flaviocopes.com/tags/services/) | Canonical: https://flaviocopes.com/aws-s3-public/

I wrote about [how to upload an image to S3](https://flaviocopes.com/node-aws-s3-upload-image/).

After I had the S3 bucket ready, and the image was uploaded and then the URL was stored in my database, I realized the image was not accessible publicly in read mode.

The image was there, but could not be seen by anyone.

If I tried to access it, all I got was something like

```
<Error>
<Code>AccessDenied</Code>
<Message>Access Denied</Message>
<RequestId>E5FBYNEYEFNZH</RequestId>
<HostId>
iImqC8XkvmPP4/BJxNGDZrPrDr7us1u3UeZqH8prlv3dk69R9m7uOaaaZDvTLAtne2rLkRWZ4=
</HostId>
</Error>
```

Ok, I thought, it's a permission issue.

So first I tried to edit the "Block public access" setting, disabling the block I had:

![AWS S3 Block public access settings with all checkboxes enabled in the bucket settings panel](https://flaviocopes.com/images/aws-s3-public/Screen_Shot_2021-06-08_at_14.25.29.png)

But this didn't work. The image was still inaccessible.

So I went and set the `Everyone (public access)` setting to `Read` in a single file permission:

![S3 file permissions tab showing Access Control List with Everyone public access grantee and object permissions](https://flaviocopes.com/images/aws-s3-public/Screen_Shot_2021-06-08_at_14.26.21.png)

and this worked, for the single file.

So I went to the general bucket permissions, which has a similar ACL permissions panel, to set the same thing.

I set `Everyone (public access)` setting to `Read` but it didn't work as expected.

People could not see the files publicly, even though I was setting it explicitly.

Turns out there's no way to make this through clicking around.

I had to set a **Bucket Policy**, which can be done from the bucket permissions page, and I added this:

```json
{
  "Version": "2008-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Sid": "AllowPublicRead",
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "AWS": "*"
      },
      "Action": "s3:GetObject",
      "Resource": "arn:aws:s3:::YOURBUCKETNAME/*"
    }
  ]
}
```

> change YOURBUCKETNAME to your bucket name

This made it work. Once you add this, you can set the `Block public access` as follows:

![AWS S3 Block public access settings with Block all public access disabled and other options enabled](https://flaviocopes.com/images/aws-s3-public/Screen_Shot_2021-06-08_at_14.39.34.png)

That's it. Now my files (images in my case) were accessible from the public.