If you need to access/manage files stored on Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) bucket via SFTP, 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.

This guide shows how to mount the S3 bucket using s3fs file system to an Amazon EC2 server and access it using WinSCP.

If you do not have a Linux server available for the mounting, launch a new Amazon EC2 server.

A basic Amazon Linux AMI (free tier eligible) server will generally suffice and the following instructions are tested on this distribution. Instructions for other distributions may differ.

To install the s3fs file system:1)

• Login to your Linux server via SSH.
• Install dependencies:
  sudo yum install automake fuse fuse-devel gcc-c++ git libcurl-devel libxml2-devel make openssl-devel
• Compile and install s3fs:
  git clone https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse.git
cd s3fs-fuse
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install

• Switch to root:
  sudo su
• Store security credentials that will be used to access the S3 bucket to /etc/passwd-s3fs:
  echo <access-key-id>:<secret-access-key> > /etc/passwd-s3fs
chmod 600 /etc/passwd-s3fs
  (Replace the <access-key-id> and <secret-access-key> with the actual values)
• Create mount point (example):
  mkdir /mnt/<bucket>
• Add entry to fstab to mount the bucket:
  echo s3fs#<bucket> /mnt/<bucket> fuse _netdev,rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other 0 0 >> /etc/fstab
  (Replace the leading <bucket> with your bucket name and the /mnt/<bucket> with the mount point)
• Mount the bucket:
  mount -a

• Learn how to connect securely to Amazon EC2 server with SFTP.
• Once connected, navigate to the mount point (e.g. /mnt/<bucket> folder).

• Guide to uploading files to SFTP server;
• Guide to automating operations (including upload).