Once at the main AWS dashboard search for the IAM service or scroll down to find the IAM service and select that.
On the left panel of the IAM service select Users.
Click Add user at the top of the screen.
Enter a User name in the text field. This can be anything (ex. webuser, s3user, appkey, etc.)
Click the check box next to Programmatic access.
Click Next: Permissions.
Select Attach existing policies directly.
In the search field right below that type in S3.
Click on the check box next to AmazonS3FullAccess.
Scroll down and click on the Next: Review button.
Click Create user.
This will display a table with your Access key ID and Secret access key. You will need to click the Show button to view your Secret access key. Important: this is the only time you will be able to see your secret access key without regenerating it, so please be sure to save it somewhere secure.
AWS S3 Bucket Creation
Go to the main AWS dashboard.
Search for or scroll down to select S3.
Click Create bucket.
Give your bucket a unique name. This could be your project name or whatever you want to call it.
Select the region you wish to store your bucket data in.
Click Next.
The next panel allows you to set custom properties for your bucket. For now we will use the default settings so click Next.
Under the drop down for Manage public permissions select Grant public read access to this bucket. Important: this will allow anyone to view all the data you put in the bucket. There are better ways to secure the data but since this is a basic tutorial we won't be going over those concepts here.
Click Next.
Click Create bucket.
Project Setup Steps
After creating an IAM user and S3 bucket, clone this repo to your computer.
Run npm install once in the project directory to install all dependancies required for this project.
Change the keys.js file to include your IAM user keys and the name of your S3 bucket.
Review the code, and implement in your own projects or applications.
Have fun!!!
Important Notes
The URL to access the objects you upload will be https://s3-yourawsregioncode-amazonaws.com/YOURS3BUCKETNAME/FILEPATH, see this link for what to put in place of yourawsregioncode. For example if my S3 bucket was called s3examplebucket, in the US West (Oregon) region and I had a file in the root directory called picture.jpg the URL to access it would be https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3examplebucket/picture.jpg
You can use Cyberduck or the AWS Console to view files, delete files, upload files, download files, and much more in your S3 bucket.
Amazon Web Services S3 is not a free service. Please be aware of all pricing related to this service. As of 08/24/2017 the pricing infomation can be found at this link.
Contact me with any questions!! You can use my contact page. Feel free to also submit issues or pull requests on GitHub.