In general, object storage solutions like Spaces are not meant to be accessed like a file system. They are API driven and most often used programmatically. Block storage, on the other hand, works almost like attaching a USB drive to your laptop. It gives you new drive with expanded storage. Check out this tutorial to learn more about the differences between the two and if object storage is right for your use case.
If your use case really requires mounting your Space like a local filesystem, s3fs-fuse is probably the tool you are looking for. On Ubuntu, you can install it with:
You’ll also need to get your Spaces access key and secret key (see here).
Then add those credentials to ~/.passwd-s3fs
, create the local directory, and mount your Space:
- echo $SPACES_KEY:$SPACES_SECRET > ~/.passwd-s3fs
- mkdir -p /path/to/local/directory
- s3fs your-space /path/to/local/directory -ourl=https://nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com -ouse_cache=/tmp

by Brian Boucheron
Flexible and scalable data storage is a baseline requirement for most applications and services being developed today. With today's complex deployments, containers, and ephemeral infrastructure, the days of simply saving files to disk on a single server are gone. Cloud providers have developed services to fill the storage needs of modern application deployments, and they mostly fit into two categories: object storage, and block storage.
I have been working with S3FS, but no luck so far configuring for DO Spaces.
See here
If you make any progress, I’d love to be able to create a directory that automatically syncs with Spaces.