How to create an access key?

To authenticate to Amazon S3, you need an access key id and a secret key.

• The access key id looks like this: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
• The secret key looks like this: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY

The secure way of setting up API access, is to create an IAM user first, and then generate the access key for that user. It is pretty simple:

1. Go to https://console.aws.amazon.com/iam/home#/users and click Add user.
2. Enter a username that is related to your project. For example, it could be something like File_transfer_app
3. Select Programmatic access
4. Click Next: Permissions
5. If you already have defined a group with the relevant access, add the user to that group. Otherwise, select Attach existing policies directly and find AmazonS3FullAccess if your application needs to upload/download data. If you only need to download data, select the AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess instead.
6. Click Next: Tags
7. Nothing to do on this page unless you use tags. Click Next: Review.
8. Review that everything is as it should be. It should look something like this:

User name               file_transfer_app
AWS access type         Programmatic access - with an access key
Permissions boundary    Permissions boundary is not set

Further down it should say AmazonS3FullAccess or AmazonS3ReadOnlyAccess in the list of permissions.

9. If everything looks good, click Create user
10. On the last page you will get an Access key ID and secret access key. Be sure to copy both values to a secure place. Note that you won't be able to see the secret access key after clicking the Close button.
11. Click Close