s3simple is a small Bash script to fetch files from and upload files to Amazon’s S3 service.
It was written to help with a fairly common case: you want to download some data from a protected S3 bucket but you don’t have a full featured configuration management system to help you install the software to do so. Perhaps the data is part of your server bootstrapping process, perhaps you just want to download and run an application tarball on a temporary server as quickly as possible, perhaps this is part of a build script that needs to run on developer laptops.
Usually in this scenario s3cmd is used. S3cmd is great; it’s powerful, feature complete, flexible and available in most distributions. But it’s not set up to use in an adhoc way. To run it with a set of one-off IAM keys you need to create a configuration file, then run s3cmd with extra command line options pointing to that configuration file, then clean up the configuration file when you’re done.
In comparison, s3simple takes an S3 url and uses the same two AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables as most AWS tools. It only has two dependencies (openssl and curl) which are installed or easily available on all modern unixes. And it’s a simple bash function that’s easy to integrate into a typical bootstrapping script.
I’ve found it useful. I hope you do too.
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