S3 is a service aimed at making developers and businesses free from worrying about having enough storage available. It is a very robust and reliable service that enables you to store any amount of data and ensures that your data will be available when you need it.
Creating a S3 bucket is just a matter of a few clicks and setting a few parameters such as the name of the bucket. Let's have a walk-through of the simple steps required to create a S3 bucket from the AWS management console:
Go to the S3 dashboard and click on Create Bucket.
Enter a bucket name of your choice and select the AWS region in which you want to create your bucket.
That's all, just click on Create and you are done.
The bucket name you choose should be unique among all existing bucket names in Amazon S3. Because bucket names form a part of the URL to access its objects via HTTP, it is required to follow DNS naming conventions.
The DNS naming conventions include the following rules:
It must be at least three and no more than 63 characters long.
It must be a series of one or more labels. Adjacent labels are separated by a single period (.).
It can contain lowercase letters, numbers, and hyphens.
Each individual label within a name must start and end with a lowercase letter or a number.
It must not be formatted as an IP address.
Some examples of valid and invalid bucket names are listed in the following table:
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Invalid bucket name |
Valid bucket name |
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Now, you can easily upload your files in this bucket by clicking on the bucket name and then clicking on Upload. You can also create folders inside the bucket.
S3cmd is a free command-line tool to upload, retrieve, and manage data on Amazon S3. It boasts some of the advanced features such as multipart uploads, encryption, incremental backup, and S3 sync among others. You can use S3cmd to automate your S3-related tasks.
You may download the latest version of S3cmd from http://s3tools.org and check for instructions on the website regarding installing it. This is a separate open source tool that is not developed by Amazon.
In order to use S3cmd, you will need to first configure your S3 credentials. To configure credentials, you need to execute the following command:
s3cmd –-configure
You will be prompted for two keys: Access Key and Secret Key. You can get these keys from the IAM dashboard of your AWS management console. You may leave default values for other configurations.
Now, by using very intuitive commands, you may access and manage your S3 buckets. These commands are mentioned in the following table:
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Task |
Command |
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List all the buckets |
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Create a bucket |
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List the contents of a bucket |
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Upload a file into a bucket |
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Download a file |
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