Skip to main content

S3 prefixes are not directories

I didn’t expect to be writing another post about S3 keys so soon, but life comes at you fast. Less than twenty-four hours after posting S3 keys are not file paths, I hit a different bug caused by poor handling of S3 keys. (Yes, really.)

The storage service I work on has to store different versions of a “bag”, and we want those versions to be human-readable. We number those versions v1, v2, v3, and we include that version as part of the S3 key for each object in the archive.

If we want to list the files in a directory on a filesystem (say, all the files in v1), we can use something like the ls command:

$ ls bags/b1234/v1/

If v1 is a directory, this returns the same results whether or not you include the trailing slash. I’ve seen various arguments about whether you should include the trailing slash in a directory path, but as far as I know it doesn’t change the behaviour when it comes to listing files.

If we want to list the objects under a prefix in S3 (again, all the files in v1), we can use aws s3 ls, which is a wrapper around the ListObjectsV2 API:

$ aws s3 ls s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v1/
s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v1/bagit.txt
s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v1/bag-info.txt

Here, the trailing slash is more significant – when S3 asks “does a key match a prefix”, it’s doing a simple string comparison. If we omit the slash, it will find other objects that we might not be expecting – what happens if, say, we’ve got more than nine versions?

$ aws s3 ls s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v1
s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v1/bagit.txt
s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v1/bag-info.txt
s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v10/bagit.txt        # Err, is this what we want?
s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v10/bag-info.txt
s3://bukkit/bags/b1234/v11/bagit.txt
...

The API is behaving as specified – v1 is indeed a prefix of v10 – but if you’re thinking of prefixes as directory paths, this result might surprise you. It certainly surprised me!

If you’re listing the objects in an S3 prefix, consider carefully whether you want a trailing slash. If you want to list it “as a directory”, you probably do.