Upload files to AWS EC2 in various Ways

The video above here is demonstrated in Telugu,

click here - to watch on Youtube

#Note: It is recommended to watch blog and video on laptop for better visibility

#Note: All the coloured texts are links that can help you navigate to particular topic

Now for Demo Purpose, let us bring an AWS EC2 instance up, make sure you have .pem key assigned to it in key pair

here point to note is that you cannot use .pem key to login to server using winscp, however winscp tool will help you convert .pem to .ppk

we want to use .pem key for powershell method which we will use later

make sure you do not lose this private key file from your local

Let us create a testupload text file in our local windows

Now before we start, we have our AWS EC2 up and running,testupload text file from local, and AWS private key that was downloaded while turning up instance

also note down the public IP of AWS EC2 that we have turned up

in this demo case it is 16.171.155.217 and since we have used ubuntu OS, user will be ubuntu

Upload files using Winscp

First tool you can use is Winscp, which you can download it for free - Winscp Download

once downloaded, open winscp

click on NewTab icon in winscp, Enter AWS Public IP and user as Ubuntu in dialogue box appeared

since we did not give any password, click on Advanced > Authentication

click on three dots at the end of Private file dialogue box to upload our key,

By default it searches for .ppk files, since our private key is in .pem format, click on dropdown and select the option with .pem, only then you will be able to find .pem format

Now click on the file and open, you will see a dialogue box similar to below screenshot

click ok, and it copies your .pem and converts to .ppk format

click ok,

click login

click on accept to save the key

Now you can see two tabs on your winscp as per below screenshot, one on the left is your local windows, to the right is your AWS EC2

you can just navigate your path as like as shown below and , you just have to drag and drop the file from left to right, or Mouse Right click - Copy and Paste as well will work

find the file of what you want to upload to AWS EC2, now just drag and drop it to right dialogue box

You can also verify from AWS EC2 instance,

Now delete the test file to play with other methods mentioned in the blog

Upload files using Powershell/CMD

Now command using Powershell/cmd goes as follows

scp -i path/to/your/private-key.pem path/to/local/file username@ec2-instance-public-dns:/path/to/remote/directory

since in most cases private key file gets into Downloads folder of local unless Download path in browser is manually changed

navigate to Downloads folder in cmd or you can use path of it

now above command will be updated in this way for our case

scp -i testupload2.pem testupload.txt ubuntu@16.171.155.217:/home/ubuntu

just like initial case, you need to accept the key during first login

our file has been uploaded, now let us see check in our AWS EC2

As you could see the file is in the server from above screenshot

Now delete the file from EC2 as to play with other methods mentioned in blog

rm testupload.txt

Before working with topics of S3 Bucket, you need to have aws cli installed in your AWS EC2

AWS CLI 1 might require python installation but AWS CLI2 comes along with python package

you can install AWS CLI 2 directly from AWS Document- AWS CLI Install Doc


sudo apt install unzip
curl "https://awscli.amazonaws.com/awscli-exe-linux-x86_64.zip" -o "awscliv2.zip"
unzip awscliv2.zip 
sudo ./aws/install

AWS CLI might take few mins to install

once aws cli is installed you can verify

Now let us a upload a file directly to S3 Bucket

search for S3 in AWS console and once you are at s3, click create Bucket, Bucket name will only be available if it is not used anywhere globally

i have modified name to testuploadbucket2345, once bucket is up, click on bucket name and click on upload > Add files

select the testfile to be uploaded from your local and click on upload

click on the file that you have uploaded to get the full path of it in s3 url

copy the details of s3 uri as shown in below screenshot

in our case it is s3://testuploadbucket2345/testupload.txt, this is the path where our file is stored

Upload files from S3 Bucket to AWS EC2 using Access keys

now to copy files from s3 bucket , you can use aws s3 cli commands like aws s3 cp

aws s3 cp $s3_bucket_object_path $destination_path

in our case above command changes to

aws s3 cp s3://testuploadbucket2345/testupload.txt /home/ubuntu/

You can face the following error though EC2 and S3 are in same VPC, this is because EC2 does not have access to other resources in AWS,

now we can solve this by using Access Keys and Access Secrets,search for IAM in AWS console

once you are in IAM console, check for security credentials as shown in below screenshot

once you click on security credentials, you will find option of Access Keys, click on Create Access keys

once access keys are created, click on Download .csv file , your downloaded file will have the below information

Now lets jump back into our AWS EC2 and configure these credentials with command

aws configure

give the credentials that we got from .csv file ,and remaining can be left as defaults as shown in below screenshot

Now our AWS EC2 is configured with access that of Root Account, if the Access keys are created with IAM account, then our AWS EC2 will have access only to resources that IAM account has

since these access keys are generated within root account, our EC2 will be able to access all resources which is not recommended,since it is a demo project, we are going with root account

Now if we run the above command

aws s3 cp s3://testuploadbucket2345/testupload.txt /home/ubuntu/

As you could see from above screenshot, we got our file now into AWS EC2

Now, also if you want to check AWS Credentials inside AWS EC2, you can check at this path

removing .aws folder also deletes credentials from EC2 , and EC2 will no longer have access to other resources in AWS

As you could see from above screenshot, we were no longer able to access s3 bucket once we removed credentials file.

let us also delete file that we uploaded to play with other methods as mentioned in the blog

we have deleted the file and also not to be confused "aws" folder as per screenshot is downloaded with awscli installation and ".aws" is a hidden file used to store credentials that we have deleted now

if you have did the demo on root account, it is important to delete Access Keys from console for better security as exposing these credentials can lead to unwanted chaos

deactivate and delete access keys

Upload files from S3 Bucket to AWS EC2 using IAM Roles

Now since we have removed access keys, if we run the command that we used previously

In order to avoid using credentials, we can also use Roles where we can make an IAM Role to have permissions only to s3 bucket and not to all the resources in AWS like the root account posses

let us create an IAM Role, search for IAM in AWS Console

click on Roles > Create Role

In service, select EC2 and in next step, we will select permission policies, Policies are to decide what permissions does this role can have!

let us give s3full access for this Role

Always prefer a name that any person from your organization can understand for the same use case to avoid having multiple IAM Roles with same permissions

once role is created, let us go back to our AWS EC2 console,

Click on Actions > Security > Modify IAM Role

select the role that you created and click on Update IAM role

Now if you run previous command, you will be able to see the file in AWS EC2

aws s3 cps3://testuploadbucket2345/testupload.txt /home/ubuntu/

As you could see from above screenshot, we were able to download the file without credentials,since we have given s3bucketfullaccess to EC2, we can also delete the file from Bucket from EC2, literally any tasks can be performed as the role attached has full access

aws s3 rm s3://testuploadbucket2345/testupload.txt

Before moving to next, delete the file to play with other methods mentioned in the blog

Upload files using Github

We have discussed how to upload files from Github to AWS EC2 during our SSL session, you can follow the same method

Upload SSL Certificate using Github in our Project

Now we need to upload this files into our server. We will discuss about various ways to upload a file in server in later part of the project.

For our comfort and time being upload files into your github account. this is not recommend way. but upload it for temporary

Go to your Github account, click on New Repository

You can leave the repository as public as we will keep the file in Git for a very short time

Once the repo is created, click on upload an existing file

upload our SSL Certificate that we downloaded

and click on commit changes

once committed, click on code and copy the URL.

Now login to AWS EC2 Server in which our application is running.

Run the git clone command

git clone https://github.com/Hari0o/SSL_temporary.git

Note: URL might differ in your case

Verify if you have the files inside server

Once you are sure, Come back to your repository and delete the Repository as SSL data is confidential

click on settings

and scroll down to the end till you see a option of delete the repository

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