S3
In sixtyfour: Humane Interface to Amazon Web Services

This vignette focuses on blob storage using S3. See the Getting Started vignette for basic setup if you have not done that yet.

S3 stands for Simple Storage Service - a product from AWS (Amazon Web Services). It's sort of like a file system on your computer in that you can store any arbitrary file type: an image, a spreadsheet, a presentation, a zip file, etc. - you can do the same in S3, but the files are called "objects". S3 is used for backups, archiving, data storage for many kinds of web or native apps, and more - and many AWS services work smoothly with S3 as the data storage layer. There's many S3 "compatible" clones offered by other companies, e.g., R2 from Cloudflare and Spaces from DigitalOcean.

This vignette breaks down use cases around buckets (or groups of objects), and files (aka objects). sixtyfour has many functions for buckets and files with lower level methods prefixed with aws_ while higher level functions are prefixed with six_.

Setup

library(sixtyfour)

Buckets

Make a random bucket name with random_bucket() from sixtyfour:

bucket <- random_bucket()
bucket
#> bucket-pjwcmbnahdoyvurs

Create a bucket - check if it exists first

exists <- aws_bucket_exists(bucket)

if (!exists) {
  aws_bucket_create(bucket)
}
#> [1] "http://bucket-pjwcmbnahdoyvurs.s3.amazonaws.com/"

Create files in a few different directories

library(fs)
tdir <- fs::path(tempdir(), "apples")
fs::dir_create(tdir)
tfiles <- replicate(n = 10, fs::file_temp(tmp_dir = tdir, ext = ".txt"))
invisible(lapply(tfiles, function(x) write.csv(mtcars, x)))

Upload them to the newly created bucket

aws_bucket_upload(path = tdir, bucket = bucket)
#> [1] "s3://bucket-pjwcmbnahdoyvurs"

List objects in the bucket

objects <- aws_bucket_list_objects(bucket)
objects
#> # A tibble: 10 × 8
#>    bucket         key   uri    size type  etag  lastmodified        storageclass
#>    <glue>         <chr> <glu> <fs:> <chr> <chr> <dttm>              <chr>       
#>  1 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:16 STANDARD    
#>  2 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:16 STANDARD    
#>  3 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:16 STANDARD    
#>  4 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:16 STANDARD    
#>  5 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:17 STANDARD    
#>  6 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:17 STANDARD    
#>  7 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:17 STANDARD    
#>  8 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:17 STANDARD    
#>  9 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:17 STANDARD    
#> 10 bucket-pjwcmb… file… s3:/… 1.74K file  "\"6… 2025-03-12 22:50:17 STANDARD

Cleanup - delete the bucket.

aws_bucket_delete(bucket)

#> Error: BucketNotEmpty (HTTP 409). The bucket you tried to delete is not empty

If there's files in your bucket you can not delete the bucket. First, delete all the files, then delete the bucket again:

aws_file_delete(objects$uri) # vector accepted
aws_bucket_list_objects(bucket) # no objects remaining
aws_bucket_delete(bucket)

Files

All or most of the file functions are built around accepting and returning character vectors of length one or greater. This includes the functions that take two inputs, such as a source and destination file. Rather than using the paws package under the hood as most functions in this package use, the file functions use s3fs under the hood (which is itself built on paws) as s3fs is a cleaner interface to S3 than paws.

First, create a bucket:

my_bucket <- random_bucket()
aws_bucket_create(my_bucket)
#> [1] "http://bucket-sdcghqxilarjzpnk.s3.amazonaws.com/"

Then, upload some files

temp_files <- replicate(n = 3, tempfile(fileext = ".txt"))
for (i in temp_files) cat(letters, "\n", file = i)
remote_files <- s3_path(my_bucket, basename(temp_files))
aws_file_upload(path = temp_files, remote_path = remote_files)
#> [1] "s3://bucket-sdcghqxilarjzpnk/file68b73610b168.txt"
#> [2] "s3://bucket-sdcghqxilarjzpnk/file68b71ef3e93.txt" 
#> [3] "s3://bucket-sdcghqxilarjzpnk/file68b71f525e3.txt"

List files in the bucket

obs <- aws_bucket_list_objects(my_bucket)
obs
#> # A tibble: 3 × 8
#>   bucket          key   uri    size type  etag  lastmodified        storageclass
#>   <glue>          <chr> <glu> <fs:> <chr> <chr> <dttm>              <chr>       
#> 1 bucket-sdcghqx… file… s3:/…    53 file  "\"a… 2025-03-12 22:50:19 STANDARD    
#> 2 bucket-sdcghqx… file… s3:/…    53 file  "\"a… 2025-03-12 22:50:19 STANDARD    
#> 3 bucket-sdcghqx… file… s3:/…    53 file  "\"a… 2025-03-12 22:50:19 STANDARD

Fetch file attributes

aws_file_attr(remote_files)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 41
#>   bucket_name    key   uri    size type  etag  last_modified       delete_marker
#>   <chr>          <chr> <chr> <fs:> <chr> <chr> <dttm>              <lgl>        
#> 1 bucket-sdcghq… file… s3:/…    53 file  "\"a… 2025-03-12 22:50:19 NA           
#> 2 bucket-sdcghq… file… s3:/…    53 file  "\"a… 2025-03-12 22:50:19 NA           
#> 3 bucket-sdcghq… file… s3:/…    53 file  "\"a… 2025-03-12 22:50:19 NA           
#> # ℹ 33 more variables: accept_ranges <chr>, expiration <chr>, restore <chr>,
#> #   archive_status <chr>, checksum_crc32 <chr>, checksum_crc32_c <chr>,
#> #   checksum_crc64_nvme <chr>, checksum_sha1 <chr>, checksum_sha256 <chr>,
#> #   checksum_type <chr>, missing_meta <int>, version_id <chr>,
#> #   cache_control <chr>, content_disposition <chr>, content_encoding <chr>,
#> #   content_language <chr>, content_type <chr>, content_range <chr>,
#> #   expires <dttm>, website_redirect_location <chr>, …

Check if one or more files exist

aws_file_exists(remote_files[1])
#> [1] TRUE
aws_file_exists(remote_files)
#> [1] TRUE TRUE TRUE

Copy files

new_bucket <- random_bucket()
aws_bucket_create(new_bucket)
#> [1] "http://bucket-ujdvcgpqwhxstlyz.s3.amazonaws.com/"

# add existing files to the new bucket
aws_file_copy(remote_files, new_bucket)
#> [1] "s3://bucket-ujdvcgpqwhxstlyz/file68b73610b168.txt"
#> [2] "s3://bucket-ujdvcgpqwhxstlyz/file68b71ef3e93.txt" 
#> [3] "s3://bucket-ujdvcgpqwhxstlyz/file68b71f525e3.txt"

# create bucket that doesn't exist yet
# the force=TRUE makes this work non-interactively
another_bucket <- random_bucket()
aws_file_copy(remote_files, another_bucket, force = TRUE)
#> [1] "s3://bucket-cwalziftpomkqyxv/file68b73610b168.txt"
#> [2] "s3://bucket-cwalziftpomkqyxv/file68b71ef3e93.txt" 
#> [3] "s3://bucket-cwalziftpomkqyxv/file68b71f525e3.txt"

Download files

tfile <- tempfile()
aws_file_download(remote_files[1], tfile)
#> [1] "/var/folders/qt/fzq1m_bj2yb_7b2jz57s9q7c0000gp/T//RtmpgkiUGL/file68b7188a278"
readLines(tfile)
#> [1] "a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z "

Rename files

aws_file_exists(remote_files[1])
#> [1] TRUE
aws_file_rename(remote_files[1], s3_path(dirname(remote_files[1]), "myfile.txt"))
#> [1] "s3://bucket-sdcghqxilarjzpnk/myfile.txt"
aws_file_exists(remote_files[1])
#> [1] FALSE

"Magical" methods

Magical methods are prefixed with six_ and wrap aws_ functions, adding helpful prompts and checks to make it more likely you'll get your task done faster.

Magical bucket methods

The magical bucket functions are:

six_bucket_add_user
six_bucket_change_user
six_bucket_delete
six_bucket_permissions
six_bucket_remove_user

An example of using one of the functions, six_bucket_add_user():

# create a bucket
bucket <- random_bucket()
if (!aws_bucket_exists(bucket)) {
  aws_bucket_create(bucket)
}
#> [1] "http://bucket-eoxhtgipqjnrskaf.s3.amazonaws.com/"

# create a user
user <- random_user()
if (!aws_user_exists(user)) {
  aws_user_create(user)
}
#> # A tibble: 1 × 6
#>   UserName        UserId     Path  Arn   CreateDate          PasswordLastUsed
#>   <chr>           <chr>      <chr> <chr> <dttm>              <dttm>          
#> 1 SimplisticSnail AIDA22PL7… /     arn:… 2025-03-12 22:50:24 NA

six_bucket_add_user(
  bucket = bucket,
  username = user,
  permissions = "read"
)
#> ✔ SimplisticSnail now has read access to bucket bucket-eoxhtgipqjnrskaf

# cleanup
six_user_delete(user)
#> ℹ Policy S3ReadOnlyAccessBucketeoxhtgipqjnrskaf detached
#> ! No access keys found for SimplisticSnail
#> ℹ SimplisticSnail deleted
aws_bucket_delete(bucket, force = TRUE)

Magical file methods

There's one file function: six_file_upload(). An example of using it:

bucket <- random_bucket()
demo_rds_file <- file.path(system.file(), "Meta/demo.rds")
six_file_upload(demo_rds_file, bucket, force = TRUE)
#> [1] "s3://bucket-hnwctmpyreodfqlj/demo.rds"

## many files at once
links_file <- file.path(system.file(), "Meta/links.rds")
six_file_upload(c(demo_rds_file, links_file), bucket)
#> [1] "s3://bucket-hnwctmpyreodfqlj/demo.rds" 
#> [2] "s3://bucket-hnwctmpyreodfqlj/links.rds"

# set expiration, expire 1 minute from now
six_file_upload(demo_rds_file, bucket, Expires = Sys.time() + 60)
#> [1] "s3://bucket-hnwctmpyreodfqlj/demo.rds"

# cleanup
obs <- aws_bucket_list_objects(bucket)
aws_file_delete(obs$uri)
#> s3://bucket-hnwctmpyreodfqlj/demo.rds
#> s3://bucket-hnwctmpyreodfqlj/links.rds
aws_bucket_delete(bucket, force = TRUE)