S3: make a public folder private again?

Question

How do you make an AWS S3 public folder private again?

I was testing out some staging data, so I made the entire folder public within a bucket. I'd like to restrict its access again. So how do I make the folder private again?

Answer 1

The accepted answer works well - seems to set ACLs recursively on a given s3 path too. However, this can also be done more easily by a third-party tool called s3cmd - we use it heavily at my company and it seems to be fairly popular within the AWS community.

For example, suppose you had this kind of s3 bucket and dir structure: s3://mybucket.com/topleveldir/scripts/bootstrap/tmp/. Now suppose you had marked the entire scripts "directory" as public using the Amazon S3 console.

Now to make the entire scripts "directory-tree" recursively (i.e. including subdirectories and their files) private again:

s3cmd setacl --acl-private --recursive s3://mybucket.com/topleveldir/scripts/

It's also easy to make the scripts "directory-tree" recursively public again if you want:

s3cmd setacl --acl-public --recursive s3://mybucket.com/topleveldir/scripts/

You can also choose to set the permission/ACL only on a given s3 "directory" (i.e. non-recursively) by simply omitting --recursive in the above commands.

For s3cmd to work, you first have to provide your AWS access and secret keys to s3cmd via s3cmd --configure (see http://s3tools.org/s3cmd for more details).