S3 Studio: Desktop S3 & CloudFront Manager Without a Hosted Backend

S3 Studio is a source-available desktop client for managing Amazon S3 buckets, editing objects, inspecting permissions, and invalidating CloudFront from one focused workspace. No hosted backend, using your existing AWS CLI profiles.

👉 Visit S3 Studio — Explore the features, download the latest release, or review the source code on GitHub.

The AWS console problem

Working with Amazon S3 from the AWS console means constantly switching tabs: one to navigate buckets, another to edit objects, another to review permissions, another to invalidate CloudFront. Each operation opens a new context and breaks your workflow.

S3 Studio solves this by providing a single desktop workspace where navigation, content, context, and edge operations stay together. It's a desktop S3 client built with Tauri, React, and TypeScript that talks directly to AWS APIs with no intermediary service.

What makes S3 Studio different

Navigate the way S3 actually works — Browse visually when exploring, click any breadcrumb segment to jump back, or paste an exact prefix when you already know the destination.

Transfer without losing context — Upload files or folders, drag from Finder or Explorer, download selections, and delete prefixes with visible progress.

Preview and edit in place — Inspect images and PDFs, open text and JSON in the Monaco editor, and save directly back to the selected S3 object. No download-edit-reupload cycle.

Understand access without ACL noise — Bucket ownership and policy controls take the lead. Legacy ACL grants remain available on demand when they genuinely matter.

Push changes to the edge — Find linked CloudFront distributions and create object, folder wildcard, or multi-selection invalidations beside the content.

Try it on your desktop

🚀 Visit S3 Studio ⬇️ Download latest release ★ View source on GitHub

macOS Apple Silicon · macOS Intel · Windows x64 · Linux x64 · Linux ARM64

No hosted backend: your credentials stay with you

S3 Studio reads the same profile configuration used by the AWS CLI and communicates directly with AWS. There's no account migration or hosted sync layer.

# your existing local setup
~/.aws/config
~/.aws/credentials
AWS_PROFILE
        │
        ▼
S3 Studio desktop app
        │
        ├── S3
        └── CloudFront

Operations run from the desktop app directly against AWS APIs. The selected profile can only perform the actions its AWS permissions allow. Review the Rust, React, and TypeScript source or build the application yourself.

Available platforms

S3 Studio ships native builds for:

macOS Apple Silicon (M1/M2/M3/M4)
macOS Intel
Windows x64
Linux x64
Linux ARM64

All releases are available on the S3 Studio GitHub page.

Ideal use cases

DevOps — Daily S3 bucket management and CloudFront invalidation without the console
Developers — Edit JSON/TXT configuration files directly in S3
Security — Review bucket permissions and policies
Static content — Manage S3 + CloudFront in a single workflow
Migration — Transfer files between buckets and local folders

Frequently asked questions

How does S3 Studio authenticate? It discovers AWS CLI profiles from the standard config and credentials files, plus common AWS environment variables. It never asks you to upload credentials to any service.

Does S3 really have folders? No. Folder rows are S3 prefixes. S3 Studio represents them as folders for navigation while keeping prefix behavior explicit in the inspector and bulk operations.

What platforms are available? Tagged releases are built for macOS Apple Silicon and Intel, Windows x64, and Linux x64 and ARM64. Check the latest release for exact assets.

How are CloudFront links found? The app matches CloudFront origins to the selected S3 bucket, accounts for origin paths, and suggests viewer-path invalidations for the selected content.

Is it free? Yes, S3 Studio is source-available and free. You can download the binaries or build from source on GitHub.