Change ACL of Amazon S3 Files in Recursive Batch

We’re in the process of moving our images to be served off of S3, and wanted to share a quick recommend I came across this evening when trying to change our presently-private S3 image files to be public. The answer is Bucket Explorer. All things being equal, you certainly won’t mistake it for a high budget piece of UI mastery, but it is surprisingly capable of doing many things that have been troublesome for me with the Firefox S3 plugin (which is a major pain to even get working with Firefox 2 (which is a major pain to upgrade to Firefox 3… I upgraded for a month, spent 5 hours trying to figure out why some pages seemed to randomly freeze indefinitely before giving up and downgrading (my best guess was it seemed to be Flash-related))), or the AWS-S3 gem, or the other free S3 browsing web service I found somewhere or another.

In addition to providing a capable, FTP-like interface for one’s S3 buckets, it can also get stats on directories, do the aforementioned recursive batch permission setting, delete buckets (S3 gem won’t let me, even with the :force => true option), a bunch of other features, and probably most importantly (for me) — it works! Tra-lee!

It’s $50 to buy, but once it finishes changing batch permissions for about 20,000 of our images files (as its currently in the process of) I would seriously consider paying it. For the time being, I’m on a fully functional 30 day trial.

4 Replies to “Change ACL of Amazon S3 Files in Recursive Batch”

  1. I’ve tried Bucket Explorer and for my needs I thought it was crap to be honest. I’ve been using SMEStorage and I have to say the experience with Amazon S3 has been a much more pleasant one !

  2. If you judge by presentation aesthetic, I think that “crap” isn’t too far from a reasonable assessment. I thought the presentation was fine, if not the standard I’m used to from the “real” apps I use.

    But functionality is where I felt Bucket Explorer really shined. Does SMEStorage let you recurisvely change permissions on your buckets? Does it let you get statistics on the your buckets? See when the files were uploaded? Delete folders in buckets that aren’t empty?

    All of these were features that I found in BE but didn’t find in alternatives I tried. If SMEStorage can do them too but with a prettier face and/or cheaper, that would be an even better solution.

  3. Actually, I don’t care about
    Actually it does. SMEStorage takes a different approach and layers a file system on top of Amazon S3 and syncs the meta data about the files. So you do see when files were uploaded, and you can delete empty folders, but you don’t really think about it in the terms of buckets etc it is back to folders and files which was what I was after i.e. I have one bucket which is my cloud storage or Cloud Drive and within this I have a fully fledged file system, just like a real disk.

  4. After uploading 4.4Gigs of data via s3sync.rb, completed after the 3rd try, i realized that i didn’t set permissions, so i can access files via web.
    I tried to update ACL for files with s3fox, no luck.. Just freezes.
    Tried s3fm, which is a tool from amazon, no luck..
    Also tried cloudberry, guess what? no luck..
    They all can’t even handle one of my folders which i call ‘contains less files’…

    Now, i simply selected the bucket with “Bucket Explorer” which contains 150000+ files, selected the batch operation, it is now listing and doing the ACL job.. Will see if it will complete the job..

    So, anyone can tell me a good tool, that i can run in linux enviroment from command line, that can sync two ways,list, and also lets me to modify ACL for large amount of files? It can be either open source (i will donate 🙂 ) or a commercial one..
    Thanks..

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