s3fs

s3fs allows Linux and Mac OS X to mount an S3 bucket via FUSE. s3fs preserves the native object format for files, allowing use of other tools like s3cmd.

Features

• large subset of POSIX including reading/writing files, directories, symlinks, mode, uid/gid, and extended attributes
• compatible with Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, and other S3-based object stores
• large files via multi-part upload
• renames via server-side copy
• optional server-side encryption
• data integrity via MD5 hashes
• in-memory metadata caching
• local disk data caching
• user-specified regions, including Amazon GovCloud
• authenticate via v2 or v4 signatures

Installation

Ensure you have all the dependencies:

On Ubuntu 14.04:

sudo apt-get install automake autotools-dev g++ git libcurl4-gnutls-dev libfuse-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev make pkg-config

On CentOS 7:

sudo yum install automake fuse-devel gcc-c++ git libcurl-devel libxml2-devel make openssl-devel

Compile from master via the following commands:

git clone https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse.git
cd s3fs-fuse
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

Examples

Enter your S3 identity and credential in a file /path/to/passwd:

echo MYIDENTITY:MYCREDENTIAL > /path/to/passwd

Make sure the file has proper permissions (if you get 'permissions' error when mounting) /path/to/passwd:

chmod 600 /path/to/passwd

Run s3fs with an existing bucket mybucket and directory /path/to/mountpoint:

s3fs mybucket /path/to/mountpoint -o passwd_file=/path/to/passwd

If you encounter any errors, enable debug output:

s3fs mybucket /path/to/mountpoint -o passwd_file=/path/to/passwd -d -d -f -o f2 -o curldbg

You can also mount on boot by entering the following line to /etc/fstab:

s3fs#mybucket /path/to/mountpoint fuse allow_other 0 0

Limitations

Generally S3 cannot offer the same performance or semantics as a local file system. More specifically:

• random writes or appends to files require rewriting the entire file
• metadata operations such as listing directories have poor performance due to network latency
• eventual consistency can temporarily yield stale data
• no atomic renames of files or directories
• no coordination between multiple clients mounting the same bucket
• no hard links

References

• s3backer - mount an S3 bucket as a single file
• s3fs-python - an older and less complete implementation written in Python
• S3Proxy - combine with s3fs to mount EMC Atmos, Microsoft Azure, and OpenStack Swift buckets
• s3ql - similar to s3fs but uses its own object format
• YAS3FS - similar to s3fs but uses SNS to allow multiple clients to mount a bucket

License

Copyright (C) 2010 Randy Rizun rrizun@gmail.com

Licensed under the GNU GPL version 2