How to install and setup s3fs on OS X 10.7 (Lion) I installed s3fs, a tool that allows mounting Amazon S3 buckets as a file system. I created folder for mounting in /mnt/s3 then I created a file in /etc/passwd-s3fs with the content BucketName:AccessKeyId:SecretAccessKey
but I still can't access it, and the error is:


  s3fs: could not determine how to establish security credentials


Am I missing something?
For Amazon s3fs you have two options for credentials: root or per user.

For a root setup you would place your credentials in here:

/etc/passwd-s3fs


And then make sure the permissions to that file are 640 like this:

sudo chmod 640 /etc/passwd-s3fs


The contents of that file should simply be [AccessKey]:[SuperSecretKey] with those two values substituted for your real access key and super secret key. Note I did not prefix the “bucket” name as you have in your example. I would recommend just seeing if you can access the S3 stuff to begin with for testing.

If you want to do user level credentials, that would be placed in the home folder of the user who would need to have s3fs access. So it would if this were for you, it would be in here:

nano ~/.passwd-s3fs


The contents of the file would be the same as /etc/passwd-s3fs but the permissions would be different. So make sure those permissions are 600 like this:

chmod 600 ~/.passwd-s3fs


Then as far as mounting goes, this is how you would mount the contents if you are root:

sudo s3fs [BucketName] /mnt/s3


Be sure to change the bucket name to match the actual bucket you wish to mount. And to run that on a per user basis using the ~/.passwd-s3fs credentials, just run the same command without sudo like this:

s3fs [BucketName] /mnt/s3


To unmount the mounted bucket, just do this:

sudo umount /mnt/s3


Or do this if you are using a per-user setup:

umount /mnt/s3