Longtime STM members may know that I regard manual uploads as the Enemy.

They take a surprising amount of time – login, navigate to correct folder, upload, swear as it doesn’t work for some reason, repeat. They’re easy to screw up – forget a file, upload to the wrong place, whatever – which is rarely serious but wastes more time. And they’re just a completely avoidable pain.

So if you’d like to never see your S3 Web console again (aside from creating new domains), this tutorial’s for you.

In it, we will create a Magic Single Button which you can double-click to instantly mirror a folder from your computer to S3.

Let’s get going.

You Will Need

  • To be able to type.

That’s it. Whilst we will be using the command line and Python-based tools, no coding knowledge is required for this. Anyone can do it!

This tutorial goes into detail for Mac and Windows, but will work for Linux too. If you use Linux as your primary desktop operating system, I’m going to assume you can probably handle writing a shell script and installing Python packages!

Step 1: Install Amazon’s Powerful AWS Tools

As you may have noticed, AWS is very much built by nerds, for nerds.

Nerds, as a rule, do not like web interfaces for things, and do very much like being able to program stuff. So Amazon have developed a set of tools allowing you to control all of AWS, including S3, from the command-line.

We’ll need to install them.

First, you should install Python on your computer. The AWS tools run on Python, which is a simple and powerful programming language.

If you don’t have the latest version of Python (2 or 3) installed, or you don’t know if you do:

Windows users, download the latest v ...

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