DigitalOcean S3 compatible object storage called Spaces allows you to store and serve large amounts of data. They are easy to create and are ready to be used within seconds without any configuration. They are ideal for storing static unstructured data like audio, video and images as well as binary files, archives, backups etc.
What’s so cool about Spaces compared to Amazon S3 is the fact that their pricing structure is WAY more easier to understand and predict. For $5/month you get 250 GB of storage and 1 TB of outbound transfer (inbound/upload is always free). Every additional GB stored costs $0.02 and every additional GB transferred costs $0.01. On top of that you can even serve these files utilizing use their free CDN service at no additional cost! (This alone on Amazon CloudFront can cost you a little fortune!).
Now back to the main topic: mounting DigitalOcean Space as a folder on your server that can be used to store any kind of data.
For the past several years I have been using Amazon S3 to backup my WHM/cPanel accounts. It works quite good but the problem is Amazon’s complex pricing model (that charges you for things like diskspace, bandwidth, requests) making price for the service is quite unpredictable. I’ve read on many places that people often got surprised at the end of the month receiving the bill from Amazon.
Recently I have started testing DigitalOcean Spaces, a service similar to Amazon’s S3 (S3 compatible alternative) but with a pricing structure anyone can understand: for $5/month you get 250 GB of storage and 1 TB of outbound transfer (inbound transfer is free like on S3). If you need more than that it will cost you 2cents per every additional GB of storage and 1cent for every additional of outbound GB. Also first two months for every new space are free!
While experimenting with s3fs I have also found out another tool written in go programming language that named Goofys. Like s3fs, this tool can also mount Amazon S3 bucket as a folder that can later be accessed just like any other local folder making accessing files in S3 bucket, backing up data or syncing files quite easy. Detailed installation manual for Goofys covers only Mac while Linux installation guide is basically non-existing, so this will be my guide on how to install Goofys and mount Amazon S3 bucket on an Ubuntu Linux. This has been tested on DigitalOcean droplet running a Ubuntu version 16.04.3 x64. If you’re also testing this out on a new VPS like me – make sure to execute apt-get update before you start.
But why would anyone want to use Goofys if s3fs is working fine? Well, according to benchmarks available at Goofys github main reason you would like to use this is performance! Goofys is much faster than s3fs. For some operations Goofys is ten times faster than s3fs making it the right choice for situations when you need access to S3 to be really fast (or as close as it being just a folder on the same drive).
How to install Go language on Ubuntu Linux?
As mentioned above Goofy is written in GO so we need to install GO in order to use Goofy. Installing go requires you to download the latest version from https://golang.org/dl/ unpack it:
<code># Download Go language binary
wget https://storage.googleapis.com/golang/go1.9.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
# Unpack the downloaded fole to /usr/local
tar -C /usr/local -xvzf go1.9.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
# Remove the archive
rm go1.9.3.linux-amd64.tar.gz
# Create the Go language work directories
mkdir -p /go/projects/goofys/{bin,pkg,src}</code>
No create this file path.sh at /etc/profile.d path
<code>vi /etc/profile.d/path.sh</code>
copy paste the line below, save the changes and exit:
AWS CLI is required by Goofy and installation is pretty straight forward:
<code>apt-get install awscli</code>
How to install Gooofy on Ubuntu Linux?
Once Go language is installed correctly, installing Goofy is quite simple. All you need to do is simply execute these two commands:
<code>go get github.com/kahing/goofys
go install github.com/kahing/goofys</code>
At this point Goofy should be installed and in order to use it we need to save
Setting up Amazon S3 credentials
To allow AWS CLI to access your S3 buckets create store credentials at this file:
<code># Make the hidden folder that holds the AWS credentials file
mkdir ~/.aws
# Create and start editing the credentials file
vi ~/.aws/credentials</code>
Don’t forget to copy/paste your actual AWS access and secret keys above. Save and exit once you’re done.
Check if AWS S3 is working
To verify if the credentials are right and that you have entered them correctly, list all the buckets using:
<code>aws s3 ls</code>
The response should show the list of available buckets.
For this test I have created a new bucket called GeekTnT
Mounting a Amazon S3 bucket with Gooofy
Now let’s create a folder where we will mount our bucket. For the purpose of this post we’ll create a folder /backup and we’ll mount GeekTnT bucket on it.
<code># Creates a backup folder
mkdir /backup
# Mount a GeekTNT.com bucket to a /backup folder
/go/projects/goofys/bin/goofys GeekTnT /backup</code>
And the final result is that now we have an s3 bucket mounted to our /backup folder with basically unlimited disk space (1PB) that we can use to store data or backups.
Unmounting the S3 bucket is simple. Just execute:
<code>umount /backup</code>
Checking if it actually works
Everything seems fine – but does it work. To test that out I’ll create a file in /backup folder and since this is a new DigitalOcean droplet and I have no bigger files that I can copy, I’ll download a Go language installation file directly into /backup folder.
If everything works these should automatically be available inside Amazon’s console.
… and there it goes.
It works!
Tags: mount butket s3 golang, mount s3 bucket golang
In case you have CentOS 6.8 server (or DigitalOcean droplet/vps) and you want to install s3fs-fuse the proposed way you’ll run into a problem: the s3fs-fuse requires fuse library version 2.8.4 or higher, but your yum install fuse fuse-devel will install you fuse 2.8.3. If you are running CentOS 7 you won’t have this problem at all, since by default, yum will install fuse 2.9.2.
To fix this problem you need to remove the fuse and install it manually.
1. Remove fuse installed by yum
yum remove fuse fuse* fuse-devel
2. Install some dependencies (for both fuse and s3fs-fuse)
yum install automake gcc-c++ git libcurl-devel libxml2-devel make openssl-devel
3. Download and install latest fuse library (version 2.9.7)
cd /usr/local/src
wget https://github.com/libfuse/libfuse/releases/download/fuse-2.9.7/fuse-2.9.7.tar.gz
tar -xzvf fuse-2.9.7.tar.gz
rm -f fuse-2.9.7.tar.gz
mv fuse-2.9.7 fuse
cd fuse/
./configure --prefix=/usr
make
make install
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/usr/lib/pkgconfig:/usr/lib64/pkgconfig/
ldconfig
4. Test that fuse is installed (should return “2.9.7″)
pkg-config --modversion fuse
5. Install the s3fs-fuse (using the default instructions from github)
cd /usr/local/src
git clone https://github.com/s3fs-fuse/s3fs-fuse.git
cd s3fs-fuse
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
sudo make install
6. If there were no errors along the way, this should return the s3fs-fuse version (currently 1.80)
s3fs --version
Hopefully, this will help you successfully install s3fs-fuse on your system. For details on how to use it please refer to documentation at the github page. Please do not hesitate to leave your comments below! Thank you.