FTP/SFTP access to an Amazon S3 Bucket

Question

Is there a way to connect to an Amazon S3 bucket with FTP or SFTP rather than the built-in Amazon file transfer interface in the AWS console? Seems odd that this isn't a readily available option.

Answer 1

There are three options.

• You can use a native managed SFTP service recently added by Amazon (which is easier to set up).
• Or you can mount the bucket to a file system on a Linux server and access the files using the SFTP as any other files on the server (which gives you greater control).
• Or you can just use a (GUI) client that natively supports S3 protocol (what is free).

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Managed SFTP Service

• In your Amazon AWS Console, go to AWS Transfer for SFTP and create a new server.

• In SFTP server page, add a new SFTP user (or users).

  • Permissions of users are governed by an associated AWS role in IAM service (for a quick start, you can use AmazonS3FullAccess policy).

  • The role must have a trust relationship to transfer.amazonaws.com.

For details, see my guide Setting up an SFTP access to Amazon S3.

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Mounting Bucket to Linux Server

Just mount the bucket using s3fs file system (or similar) to a Linux server (e.g. Amazon EC2) and use the server's built-in SFTP server to access the bucket.

• Install the s3fs
• Add your security credentials in a form access-key-id:secret-access-key to /etc/passwd-s3fs

• Add a bucket mounting entry to fstab:

  <bucket> /mnt/<bucket> fuse.s3fs rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other 0 0
  

For details, see my guide Setting up an SFTP access to Amazon S3.

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Use S3 Client

Or use any free "FTP/SFTP client", that's also an "S3 client", and you do not have setup anything on server-side. For example, my WinSCP or Cyberduck.

WinSCP has even scripting and .NET/PowerShell interface, if you need to automate the transfers.