Mount AWS S3 bucket to Ubuntu file system

I cannot find any Ubuntu PPA that has latest S3FS, so we will need to compile it from source to have latest version

sudo apt-get install build-essential git libfuse-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libxml2-dev mime-support automake libtool
sudo apt-get install pkg-config libssl-dev
git clone https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse
cd s3fs-fuse/
./autogen.sh
./configure --prefix=/usr --with-openssl
make
sudo make install

S3FS needs AWS access key id and secret key to work. Create .passwd-s3fs file at ~/.passwd-s3fs with content

<AWS Access Key ID>:<AWS Secret Access Key>

Example

AKIAJAXZBXCKFAOWRE4A:K6Az0uBN76I8xIHArdkr5gvrNQLR1fE3m8OywhJB

Mount AWS S3 bucket to file system

mkdir /tmp/cache # To be used as cache for S3FS
chmod 777 /tmp/cache
mkdir /mnt/s3 # To mount to, use any path you want
s3fs -o use_cache=/tmp/cache mybucket /mnt/s3 # With mybucket is your bucket name

Now, you can use /mnt/s3 as normal folder, files added/removed in it will be synced to S3 automatically.

Tips

• If you are using S3FS for web app, you will need to allow apache or www-data or … (user runs web server) access mounted S3. Add option allow_other to archive this, so the command will bes3fs -o allow_other,use_cache=/tmp/cache mybucket /mnt/s3
• In most cases, you will want S3 to be mounted automatically after each reboot. So, add below line to /etc/fstab. Please note that fstab is run by root user, so you need to copy .passwd-s3fs to root home directory if it was not there (or you can use /etc/passwd-s3fs for system-wide configuration)s3fs#mybucket /mnt/s3 fuse allow_other,use_cache=/tmp/cache 0 0
• If you have more than 1 bucket to mount to same system, you will need to use startup script instead of fstab because if you use fstab, only 1 bucket will be mounted. With Ubuntu, using local.rc may be the best choice for startup script