s3fs is a FUSE filesystem that allows you to mount an Amazon S3 bucket as a local filesystem. It stores files natively and transparently in S3 (i.e., you can use other programs to access the same files).

The following instructions detail the steps to install the program s3fs on an Amazon EC2 running Debian 5.0.5.

1. Install libfuse
   First, you need to install the package libfuse manually as the one provided via apt-get is too old (s3fs needs a version greater than or equal to 2.8.4).

   wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/fuse/fuse-2.X/2.8.7/fuse-2.8.7.tar.gz
   tar xzf fuse-2.8.7.tar.gz
   cd fuse-2.8.7
   ./configure --prefix=/usr
   make install
   

2. Install libxml
   You can simply install the package provided by apt-get:

   apt-get install libxml2-dev
   

3. Upgrade mount
   Because of a problem between fuse and mount, you need to upgrade the version of mount:

   wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/util-linux/v2.21/util-linux-2.21-rc1.tar.gz
   tar xzf util-linux-2.21-rc1.tar.gz
   ./configure --prefix=/usr --without-ncurses
   make install
   

   For more information about this issue, please go to the following page: http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/issues/detail?id=228

4. Install s3fs
   You can now install s3fs using the following commands:

   wget http://s3fs.googlecode.com/files/s3fs-1.61.tar.gz
   tar xvzf s3fs-1.61.tar.gz
   cd s3fs-1.61/
   ./configure --prefix=/usr
   make install
   

Note that I wanted to use s3fs to create incremental snapshot-style backups with rsync. Unfortunately, as mentioned on the following page, it didn’t work because s3fs doesn’t support hard links: http://code.google.com/p/s3fs/issues/detail?id=46