Create your first S3 bucket

Hub › AWS › Beginner › Create your first S3 bucket

Goal

After this page you will have an empty S3 bucket in your chosen region, listed by aws s3 ls.

Prerequisites

Pick a bucket name

Bucket names are globally unique. A safe pattern is <your-name>-<purpose>-<year>. Pick something with no chance of collision.

Throughout the rest of this tier we'll write BUCKET=aarav-beginner-site-2026 — substitute your own name in.

Save it as a shell variable so the rest of the tier copy-pastes cleanly:

bash

export BUCKET=aarav-beginner-site-2026

(Use your name, not Aarav's.)

For most regions, one command:

bash

aws s3api create-bucket \
  --bucket "$BUCKET" \
  --region ap-southeast-1 \
  --create-bucket-configuration LocationConstraint=ap-southeast-1

If you picked us-east-1 as your region, us-east-1 is the only region that does NOT take LocationConstraint. Use this shorter form instead:

bash

aws s3api create-bucket \
  --bucket "$BUCKET" \
  --region us-east-1

Expected output:

json

{
    "Location": "/aarav-beginner-site-2026"
}

If you get BucketAlreadyExists, someone else owns that name globally. Pick a different one and re-export BUCKET.

aws s3 ls

Output (lists every bucket in your account, oldest first):

2026-06-15 14:32:11 aarav-beginner-site-2026

The bucket is empty. The next page writes the file you'll put inside it.

Next → Write index.html locally