AWS CLI

The AWS commandline interface (CLI) is a unified tool to manage your AWS services, including AWS S3. Here we will show you how to configure and use AWS CLI to manage your SOS buckets.

Installation

You can install AWS CLI using your package manager or by downloading the latest version from the AWS website.

Create an IAM key

You need an IAM api-key with a policy that allows the management of SOS buckets. A simple policy that allows all operations on all buckets is:

{
  "default-service-strategy": "deny",
  "services": {
    "sos": {
      "type": "allow"
    }
  }
}

You find more information about key management and IAM policies in the IAM documentation.

Configure your AWS CLI

You can configure your AWS CLI interactively using the aws configure command or with a script. Here is an example of a script that you can use to configure a new exoscale profile for your AWS CLI:

export AWS_PROFILE=exoscale
S3_REGION="ch-gva-2"

# Assuming you have stored your Exoscale api-key and api-secret in `pass` password store.
aws configure set aws_access_key_id "$(pass exoscale/api_key)"
aws configure set aws_secret_access_key -- "$(pass exoscale/api_secret)" # Note the double hyphen!
aws configure set region "${S3_REGION}"
aws configure set endpoint_url "https://sos-${S3_REGION}.exo.io"

The double hyphen is required to prevent the AWS CLI from interpreting a secret that starts with a hyphen as a flag. Exoscale’s secrets sometimes start with a hyphen.

Test your configuration

Now you are ready to use your SOS bucket with the AWS CLI. The following commands will create a bucket, list buckets, and delete the bucket using the exoscale profile.

export AWS_PROFILE=exoscale
BUCKET="aws-cli-bucket-$(uuidgen)" # Must be unique as per S3 specs.

aws s3 mb "s3://${BUCKET}"
aws s3 ls
aws s3 rb "s3://${BUCKET}"
aws s3 ls

Advanced usage

The command aws s3 covers only basic operations. For advanced usage, you can use the aws s3api command. For example, you can list the oldest five versions of a bucket’s object(s) using the following command:

export AWS_PROFILE=exoscale
export AWS_REGION=at-vie-1
export AWS_ENDPOINT_URL="https://sos-${AWS_REGION}.exo.io"
BUCKET="your-sos-bucket"
TMP=$(mktemp -t s3-delete-XXX)

# Prefix, query and output are optional.
aws s3api list-object-versions \
    --bucket "$BUCKET" \
    --prefix "your-prefix/your-object" \
    --query '{Objects:Versions | sort_by(@, &LastModified)[:5].{Key:Key,VersionId:VersionId}}' \
    --output json | tee "$TMP"

The command above will create a temporary file containing a correctly formatted list of versions that you can use to delete them:

aws s3api delete-objects \
    --bucket "$BUCKET" \
    --delete "file://$TMP" \
    --debug # To see what's going on.

A list of all available aws s3/s3api commands can be found at:

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3
https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/reference/s3api

Last updated on March 11, 2026