How to upload file to Amazon S3? - amazon-web-services

Question

I have a PHP app running on a AWS EC2 instance. I want to upload a file to unit and then save that file to a S3 bucket. I can get the file up to the Ec2 instance with now problem but for the life of me I cannot figure out how to use the puObject call to move it to the S3 instance... I am very new to AWS so if anyone can give me a pointer, that'd help out a lot!

Answer 1

You have three options for how to transfer data from the EC2 instance to S3 using PHP:
1. Use the AWS PHP SDK
This is the preferred option. The SDK is released by Amazon and includes an easy to use API interface for all of their services. It can also allow you to use the EC2 instance's IAM role for credentials, meaning you don't necessarily need to store your API keys etc in the code. Example use:
// Use an Aws\Sdk class to create the S3Client object.
$s3Client = $sdk->createS3();
// Send a PutObject request and get the result object.
$result = $s3Client->putObject([
'Bucket' => 'my-bucket',
'Key' => 'my-key',
'Body' => file_get_contents($pathToYourFile)
]);
// Download the contents of the object.
$result = $s3Client->getObject([
'Bucket' => 'my-bucket',
'Key' => 'my-key'
]);
// Print the body of the result by indexing into the result object.
echo $result['Body'];
2. Use the EC2 instance's AWS CLI
This is less ideal, but still doable. I wouldn't recommend doing this as it would mean you use PHP to access the shell, and assume that the shell has the AWS CLI configured (most if not all EC2 instances would do by default). Example:
shell_exec('aws s3 cp /path/to/your/file.txt s3://bucket-name/path/your/file.txt');
3. Bake your own S3 API call using REST
This is probably the next best option after using the SDK, although it requires that you store the credentials in code, have to formulate your HMAC signatures and ensure that your API structure matches Amazon's guidelines. Note that the PHP SDK does this all for you, but this way you don't need the whole SDK installed.
If you go this way, you'll need to read up about how to sign your requests.