FTP/SFTP access to an Amazon S3 Bucket
amazon-s3, ftp, sftp
Solution
There are three options.
- You can use a native Amazon Managed SFTP service (aka AWS Transfer for SFTP), 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).
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.
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.
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.
Problem
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.