How do I mount a subdirectory in my Object Storage bucket using s3fs?
Linode
Linode Staff
I'm using Object Storage, and a tool called s3fs, which makes it possible to mount S3-compatible storage as a normal filesystem in Linux. This works very well when mounting the whole bucket.
However, when I'm trying to mount a "subdirectory" using the syntax $BUCKET_NAME:/$FOLDER_NAME, this does not work. So my question is, is there a way to mount only a single folder contained in one of my Object Storage buckets using the s3fs tool?
1 Reply
tgiuffreda
Linode Staff
I was able to accomplish this using Debian 9 running on a standard Linode plan, with the latest version of s3fs. My Object Storage bucket is set to Private using the ACL dropdown in the bucket details in Linode Cloud Manager. I had several folders created in the bucket, with a few files in each.
I first created an empty directory on my Linode to serve as a mount point for the specific bucket subdirectory I'm trying to mount.
I created a file, named
.passwd-s3fsin my home directory, with my access key credentials in this format:
S3_ACCESS_KEY:S3_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY
- I then set the permissions to owner-only for
.passwd-s3fsby running
chmod 600 .passwd-s3fs
- Finally I mounted my bucket subdirectory to the mount point by running the following command:
s3fs $BUCKET_NAME:/$FOLDER_NAME /PATH/TO/MOUNT/POINT -o passwd_file=/HOME/USER/.passwd-s3fs -o url=https://[cluster-id].linode.objects.com/
In this example:
$BUCKET_NAME:/$FOLDER_NAME is the name of my bucket and the specific subdirectory I am looking to mount
/PATH/TO/MOUNT/POINT is the empty directory I had created to serve as the mount point
/HOME/USER/.passwd-s3fs is the location of my credentials file
https://[cluster-id].linode.objects.com/ is the location of your cluster, where [cluster-id] = eu-central-1, us-east-1, ap-south-1, depending on the location of your bucket.
After running that last command, my folder mounted correctly to my mount point folder. I then tested it by writing files to the mounted subfolder and verified that they appeared when viewing my bucket in Cloud Manager. Additionally, I added files to the subfolder in Cloud Manager then verified that they appeared correctly in my mounted subfolder on my Linode.
For further reading, I would suggest the s3fs-fuse GitHub page, specifically the section pertaining to using s3fs with non-Amazon S3 implementations. There is also a section below the one in my latter link pertaining to fstab, if you are interested in automatically mounting the folder on each boot.
I encountered a lot of different methods for doing this process while researching, but this was the working solution I settled on. If you have any other suggestions or useful tips, please feel free to share them in response to this!