s3fs "could not determine how to establish security credentials"

Question

I'm trying to use s3fs to mount an S3 bucket on to a standard AWS Amazon Linux AMI (with all the necessary dependencies installed). However when following this tutorial when I run: s3fs mybucketname -o allow_other myfolder or variations thereof, I get a response of:

s3fs: could not determine how to establish security credentials

I've tried:

creating passwd-s3fs in the etc folder, with the format: accessID:secretAccessKey
creating .passwd-s3fs in the home folder
setting AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID & AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY environment variables
Opening up permissions on passwd-s3fs as far as possible (it's become more secure since this question)
Giving the IAM user associated with this Access Key Administrator Access
Successfully connecting via a local client with the same Access & Secret Access Key details
Generally double checking everything for typos etc

I've a feeling I'm doing something dumb AWS side (I'm totally new to AWS), is there something specific I need to apply to the S3 bucket Permissions, Policy etc? This is driving me mad, help much appreciated!

It's unlikely to be anything in IAM, bucket policy, etc... sounds like an issue on the local machine. You could try using `strace` to observe the system calls `s3fs` is making when you invoke it, and probably discover something useful from that. — Michael - sqlbot, Oct 14 '14 at 03:33
The error "could not determine how to establish security credentials" occurs when the access key and password are not available. Maybe check the file permissions on .passwd-s3fs? — , Jul 07 '15 at 17:27

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Sep 18 '20 at 12:20

I found the best way to resolve this was to use the -o iam_role option to pass the name of the instance role in, plus if you're not in the us-east-1 region, you may also need to specify the url and endpoint options.

E.g.

s3fs mybucketname -o allow_other myfolder -o iam_role=$iam_role_name -o endpoint=${aws_region} -o url=https://s3-${aws_region}

(This is the command I used to mount an S3 bucket to an ECS container host instance, so an EC2 instance deployed as part of a cluster)

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Jun 02 '20 at 06:46

Although this question is old, I also had the problem so I figure I would post the solution that worked for me in case another person has the same issue.

sudo apt purge s3fs -y
sudo apt update -y && sudo apt upgrade -y
sudo apt install s3fs -y

In the current users home directory, create a txt file with the name .passwd-s3fs with your IAM credentials as such:

key:secret

i.e

kjewndkjsn8387:emkwlmskld8/knsdknjnsjnsdk

# 1. use a text editor to add your key:secret & save the file
vim ~/.passwd-s3fs
# set permissions of .passwd-s3fs to 0400
sudo chmod 0400 ~/.passwd-s3fs
# mount drive s3fs /the_remote_path as /local_path
# i.e 
s3fs my_bucket:/the_remote_path /local_path

s3fs "could not determine how to establish security credentials"

2 Answers2