S3 API

Ontario Library Research Cloud > S3 API

The term “Container” is Swift’s name for a grouping of objects. The equivalent in S3 is called a “Bucket”. We use these terms interchangeably in this article.

Compatibility

The OLRC supports the AWS S3 API with some compatibility caveats. See the S3/Swift REST API Comparison Matrix for a list of all supported operations. All basic operations, like object retrieval, upload, deletion, container creation etc. are all fully supported.

Generate S3 Credentials

Before you can use the S3 API, you need to generate an access key and a secret key. These keys are always scoped to a single project.

Once you have installed OpenStack, you can generate S3 credentials with this command.

openstack ec2 credentials create

The output will look similar to this:

+------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Field      | Value                                                                                                                                           |
+------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| access     | abcdef012345678997303245e0eb9a7d                                                                                                                |
| links      | {'self': 'https://olrc2auth.scholarsportal.info/v3/users/66074d7fa08d48ba827f320396e54452/credentials/OS-EC2/26d8741d6d6e4f6497303245e0eb9a7d'} |
| project_id | abcdef012345678992a2f9ca6d9ab7f0                                                                                                                |
| secret     | abcdef01234567899f63edc3e0ed7134                                                                                                                |
| trust_id   | None                                                                                                                                            |
| user_id    | abcdef0123456789827f320396e54452                                                                                                                |
+------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The values we want are “access” and “secret”.

Now that we have these values, you can use virtually any S3-compatible software, whether it be CLI or a GUI.

When configuring the endpoint, you will need to provide the following required parameters.

  • Host: https://olrc2.scholarsportal.info
  • Access: The access key from the above command
  • Secret: The secret key from the above command

Some software will also require you to specify some or all of the following parameters.

  • Region: RegionOne
  • Signature Version: Either V2 or V4 should work
  • Addressing style: Either path style or virtual-host style will work

S3 CLI Tools

Here is a list of some command-line tools that you can use with the S3 API. Not every software has been exhaustively tested, so your mileage may vary. Additional GUI tools are available under Other Tools.