Managing Amazon S3 using AWS-CLI

This small write up is about how one can use AWS-CLI tool manage your S3 bucket from your laptop;

Let's assume you have an AWS account (IAM user, an user who has limited access to AWS resources) say, "s3-limited" and this user is attached to a custom group  "limited-access-group" which is having "AmazonS3FullAccess" policy attached to it.

Thus, this particular user is capable of carrying out all the operations like read, write, remove etc. on a Amazon S3 bucket.

Let's talk about how this can be achieved using AWS CLI tool;

You can check how to install AWS CLI tool here;

Once the installtion is done, it is time to configure the tool; (Please keep "AWS access key" and "AWS Secret key" handy);

1. Configure a specific AWS user (eg. s3-limited):

$ aws configure --profile s3-limited
AWS Access Key ID [None]: <provide the access key>
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: <provide secret key>
Default region name [None]: <provide region name>
Default output format [None]:

2. Now, lets test the set up:

i. Create a bucket (aws s3 mb):

$ aws s3 mb s3://test-bucket-bijit  --profile s3-limited
make_bucket: s3://test-bucket-bijit/


ii. List buckets (aws s3 ls):
$ aws s3 ls --profile s3-limited
2016-08-11 13:36:05 test-bucket-bijit

iii. Put some contents under the bucket:
I have uploaded a test file using AWS web interface (S2 dashboard)

iv. List the contents of that Bucket:
$ aws s3 ls s3://test-bucket-bijit
2016-08-11 13:41:30         11 test-file-bijit.txt


v. Let's try to push a file to S3 bucket:

$ aws s3 cp xx.txt s3://test-bucket-bijit/
upload: ./xx.txt to s3://test-bucket-bijit/xx.txt

vi. List contents:
$ aws s3 ls s3://test-bucket-bijit/
2016-08-11 13:41:30         11 test-file-bijit.txt
2016-08-11 13:53:39          0 xx.txt

vii.         Let's copy (download) a file from S3 to a local directory;
$ aws s3 cp s3://test-bucket-bijit/xx.txt .
download: s3://test-bucket-bijit/xx.txt to ./xx.txt


Please note: you can also copy files between two S3 buckets.