mountpoint-s3

Mountpoint for Amazon S3 is a tool from AWS Labs that lets you treat a storage bucket on Amazon S3 as if it were a folder on your local computer. Once you mount a bucket using this tool, programs running on your machine can read and write files in that folder using normal file commands, and the tool handles all the communication with S3 in the background.

Amazon S3 is a cloud storage service where data is stored as objects rather than in a traditional folder structure. Most programs expect a regular file system, which means they cannot talk to S3 directly. Mountpoint bridges that gap by translating standard file operations into the API calls that S3 understands, so existing programs can work with S3 data without modification.

The tool is optimized for specific situations: reading large files with high throughput, processing data from S3 across many machines at once, and writing new files straight to S3. It is not designed for general-purpose file editing. Operations that file systems typically support but S3 does not, like renaming a directory or editing an existing file in place, either do not work or have limited support. The README explicitly notes you should not run a Git repository or a text editor inside a mounted folder.

Installation packages are available for Amazon Linux, other RPM-based Linux distributions, and Ubuntu. After installing, you run a single command to mount a bucket to a directory, supplying your AWS credentials and the bucket name. The bucket then appears as a directory and you can list files, copy data in or out, and read content using standard tools.

The project is written in Rust, licensed under Apache 2.0, and is generally available with an active public roadmap. It is maintained by AWS Labs and accepts community contributions.