Setting permissions on Amazon AWS S3 buckets using S3cmd

Calvium stores virtually all of its toolkit data on S3 servers. We often find ourselves using Cyberduck to manually upload and download files when required. One thing that is a pain though is setting permissions. Cyberduck doesn't appear to allow you to set the permissions on all files within a folder recursively. When you have a lot of files this can be a real pain. Happily s3cmd comes to the rescue! s3cmd is a third-party (e.g. not created by amazon) command line client for S3 which runs on linux, unix, and also MacOSX. It may compile on Windows, I haven't tried.

1) Make everything in a bucket public (e.g. everyone has read access)

s3cmd setacl s3://myexamplebucket.calvium.com/ --acl-public --recursive

2) Make everything in a bucket private (e.g. accessible only to the creator)

s3cmd setacl s3://myexamplebucket.calvium.com/ --acl-private --recursive

The above commands also work on folders within buckets, or on individual files (the --recursive option is not required in this last case). As you can imagine there are many more options (type s3cmd --help to see more help).

3) Disable Directory Listing in a bucket

s3cmd setacl s3://myexamplebucket.calvium.com/ --acl-private

By default, new buckets will list all of the files within them. This isn't usually a good idea though, as it makes it very easy indeed for someone to scape all the content of your site. The command above just omits the --recursive option. For new buckets it's probably best to run command (1) before (3) so that your files are actually readable.