Setup an SFTP server through an Amazon AWS EC2 Instance

SFTP on Amazon S3

If you need to access/manage files stored on Amazon S3 bucket via SFTP, you can mount the bucket to a file system on a Linux server and access the files using the SFTP as any other files on the server.


Creating Access Server

Launch a new Amazon EC2 server. A basic Amazon Linux AMI (free tier eligible) server will generally suffice and the following instructions are tested on this distribution. Instructions for other distributions may differ.

To install the s3fs file system

-	Login to your Linux server via SSH. 
-	Install dependencies: 
sudo yum install automake fuse fuse-devel gcc-c++ git libcurl-devel libxml2-develmake openssl-devel
-	Compile and install s3fs: 
git clone https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse.git 
cd s3fs-fuse 
./autogen.sh 
./configure 
make 
sudo make install


Mounting S3 Bucket to File System

-	Switch to root: 
sudo su
-	Store security credentials that will be used to access the S3 bucket to /etc/passwd-s3fs: 
echo <access-key-id>:<secret-access-key> > /etc/passwd-s3fs 
chmod 600 /etc/passwd-s3fs 
(Replace the <access-key-id> and <secret-access-key> with the actual values)
-	Create mount point (example): 
mkdir /mnt/<bucket>
-	Add entry to fstab to mount the bucket: 
echo s3fs#<bucket> /mnt/<bucket> fuse _netdev,rw,nosuid,nodev,allow_other,nonempty 0 0 >> /etc/fstab 
(Replace the leading <bucket> with your bucket name and the /mnt/<bucket> with the mount point)
-	Mount the bucket: 
mount -a