S3 Upload

Replace CloudApp and Droplr for sharing files, screenshots, and videos with friends and co-workers.

With a little set-up, you can:

• Auto-upload files the cloud for free.
• Easily anotate image uploads with your preferred graphics software.
• Copy sharable URLs to clipboard automatically.

For more information on how to easily set this up, check out the automation section.

Benefits

With this guide, you can replace your screenshot sharing tool with something better:

• 5GB completely free.
• Configure auto-expire or not.
• 100% free and open source software.
• About 3x to 10x faster than competing services.
• Bring your own annotation / graphics software like Gimp, Sketch, or Photoshop.
• Get links to direct files. No intermediary pages. No tracking.

Install

Simply copy the s3-upload executable to your PATH. For example:

wget https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jchook/s3-upload/master/bin/s3-upload
chmod +x s3-upload
sudo mv s3-upload /usr/local/bin

You can repeat the same process for upgrades to a newer version.

Platforms

So far I have only tested this on Ubuntu 18.04 but I expect it will work on:

• Linux, BSD, etc
• Mac OS X
• Windows 10 (with WSL)

Requirements

• bash and curl (usually built-in)
• Amazon S3 account (free)

Usage

To upload, simply pass file path(s) to the executeable, e.g.

s3-upload aww-yeah.gif

For a deeper understanding of the usage:

s3-upload [options] [--] [<file> | -] ...

A sharable URL link for the uploaded file will print to standard output. You can use the --copy option to copy it to clipboard, or the --quiet option to suppress this behavior.

Config file

The first time you run s3-upload, it will guide you through configuring your S3 details. However, you can opt to manage the config file manually.

You can configure almost all option defaults. Simply edit the file ~/.config/s3-upload:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="XXX"
AWS_ACCESS_KEY_SECRET="YYY"
S3_BUCKET_NAME="ZZZ"
COPY=1
NOTIFY=1
QUIET=

Options

Command-line options allow you to override all configuration at the call site.

  -c, --config <file>
    Load a custom configuration file.

  -C, --copy
    Copy the share URL to clipboard.

  -N, --notify
    Notify successful upload via notify-send.

  -n, --name <name>
    Choose custom name(s) for an uploaded file.
    Use multiple times (in order) for multiple files.
    Most useful when piping data into s3-upload via STDIN.

  -k, --key <access-key-id>
    Use a specific IAM access key.

  -p, --secret <secret-key>
    Use a specific IAM access secret. Use empty string to prompt.

  -q, --quiet
    Don't print any information to STDOUT.

  --stdin
    Read a newline-separated file list from STDIN.

  -u, --username <username>
    Use a specific username.

  <file> ...
    Path(s) to the file(s) you want to upload.
    Specify a hyphen (-) to pipe data from stdin.

Examples

• Upload multiple files

  s3-upload file1.txt file2.mp3

• Upload from STDIN with a custom name

  curl api.ipify.org | s3-upload --name ip.txt -

• Upload a file and copy the url to the system clipboard

  s3-upload --copy file.png

Automation

I found some really great ways to integrate this tool into my workflow:

• Upload screenshots and screencast
• Annotate screenshots

License

MIT.

See also

• s3cmd
• s3put