How to Hide File Listings but Allow Public Downloads in MinIO?

This guide was created for MinIO release RELEASE.2025-05-24T17-08-30Z.

Step 1: Create bucket alias

mc alias set myminio https://minio.example.com YOUR_ACCESS_KEY YOUR_SECRET_KEY
mc mb myminio/public

Step 2: Set the bucket policy have a public read-only access

mc anonymous set download myminio/public

This does the following:

Allows listing files in the bucket.
Allows downloading any file.

Step 3: Edit the bucket policy JSON

First, run the following command to get the current JSON policy created by the previous step.

mc anonymous get-json myminio/public

The output will look like the following: “That’s the policy defined by the 'download' preset.

{
 "Statement": [
  {
   "Action": [
    "s3:GetBucketLocation",
    "s3:ListBucket"
   ],
   "Effect": "Allow",
   "Principal": {
    "AWS": [
     "*"
    ]
   },
   "Resource": [
    "arn:aws:s3::: public"
   ]
  },
  {
   "Action": [
    "s3:GetObject"
   ],
   "Effect": "Allow",
   "Principal": {
    "AWS": [
     "*"
    ]
   },
   "Resource": [
    "arn:aws:s3::: public/*"
   ]
  }
 ],
 "Version": "2012-10-17"
}

The line that allows anyone to list the files available in bucket is s3:ListBucket in the 'Action' property. Just remove it and upload the policy again with the following command.

mc anonymous set-json /path-to-your-edited-json-policy.json myminio/public

Where file /path-to-your-edited-json-policy.json contains the edited version of your policy.

{
 "Statement": [
  {
   "Action": [
    "s3:GetBucketLocation"
   ],
   "Effect": "Allow",
   "Principal": {
    "AWS": [
     "*"
    ]
   },
   "Resource": [
    "arn:aws:s3::: public"
   ]
  },
  {
   "Action": [
    "s3:GetObject"
   ],
   "Effect": "Allow",
   "Principal": {
    "AWS": [
     "*"
    ]
   },
   "Resource": [
    "arn:aws:s3:::public/*"
   ]
  }
 ],
 "Version": "2012-10-17"
}

Step 4: Verify listings are hidden

Open the root of your MinIO S3 endpoint. For example 'youbucket.s3.yourdomain.com'. If you get an XML-formatted error saying ‘Access Denied’, then everything is working as expected!