Amazon S3
Amazon S3 is the only provider in S3 Explorer that needs no endpoint URL at all. The SDK derives it from the region, which is why the endpoint field stays empty and the region field does the work. It is also the only one where temporary credentials are the norm rather than the exception.
Connection settings
- Endpoint
- Not required — derived from the region
- Default region
- us-east-1
- Addressing
- Virtual-hosted
- Temporary credentials
- Supported (STS / AssumeRole)
A filled-in example
Every value below is fabricated — they are shaped like real Amazon S3 credentials so you can recognise yours, and they authenticate nothing.
- Region
- eu-west-3
- Access key
- AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
- Secret key
- wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
- Addressing
- Virtual-hosted
Leave the endpoint empty. Those two keys are the example pair published in AWS documentation — they authenticate nothing.
Where each value comes from
Endpoint
No endpoint URL needed. AWS S3 uses region-based routing automatically.
Credentials
Go to AWS Console → IAM → Users → Security credentials to create Access Keys.
Notes
Virtual-hosted style is the default. Path-style is deprecated since 2020. Use session tokens for temporary credentials (STS/AssumeRole).
What usually goes wrong
Path-style is deprecated, not removed
AWS announced the retirement of path-style addressing in 2020 and then kept it alive for existing buckets. New buckets should assume virtual-hosted only. If you are migrating a script that forced path-style, that is the setting to drop first.
Session tokens expire mid-session
Credentials from STS or AssumeRole carry an expiry, usually one hour. A connection that worked at 09:00 and returns 403 at 10:05 has not been misconfigured — the token lapsed. Generate a new one rather than re-checking the keys.
The region has to match the bucket
Pointing a eu-west-3 profile at a bucket in us-east-1 fails with a redirect error rather than a clear message. S3 Explorer ships all 27 AWS regions in the dropdown so you can switch without retyping.
Regions available in the app
us-east-1us-east-2us-west-1us-west-2eu-west-1eu-west-2eu-west-3eu-central-1eu-central-2eu-north-1eu-south-1eu-south-2ap-southeast-1ap-southeast-2ap-southeast-3ap-northeast-1ap-northeast-2ap-northeast-3ap-south-1ap-south-2ap-east-1sa-east-1ca-central-1me-south-1me-central-1af-south-1il-central-1