Background: I've used S3 to host various static content over the years, be it for emails or static websites. Today, I needed to download some of those assets. This was my journey:

1. Discover the S3 web UI won't let you download more than one file at a time

2. Install CLI: `brew install awscli` including a bunch of deps: `ca-certificates`, `[email protected]`, `readline`, `sqlite`, `xz`, `[email protected]`, `docutils` and `six`

3. Run `aws configure`

4. Learn what IAM is and that you not only need an access key, but also an IAM user

5. Open IAM doc link that only describes what the name requirements, object quotas, and STS(?) character limits of IAM are

6. ???

7. Find actual article describing how to create an IAM user

8. Delete old CLI user that is 7 years old and you no longer have credentials for

9. Before creating the user, create a group

10. Attach the right permissions policies to the group. There's only 817 to chose from - easy.

11. Creating a user with the same name as the previous deleted user resurrects that user??? Yep, yep, yep, this is fine...

12. Realize I have to hard reload the page for the frontend to update my IAM user info. 2023 tech right here.

13. Create access key for the new IAM user

14. Warning pops up: "Alternatives recommended: Use the AWS CLI V2 and enable authentication through a user in IAM Identity Center." – wtf do you think I just did, buddy???

15. Finally log into aws CLI

16. Copy files using `aws s3 cp`

breathe

Yikes!