Creating an IAM User for Press3

When setting up Press3 to store your WordPress site's static assets on your own Amazon S3 account, you'll need to provide credentials for an authenticated user with access to the S3 bucket. In this article, we'll show you how to create a new IAM user with the permissions they need.

Configuring IAM User Policies

When creating a new IAM user, you'll need to set an access policy. Generally, it's a bit simpler to create the policy before you create the user. Otherwise, you'd need to stop and create the policy in the middle of a user creation step.

If you haven't already created a policy for your user that will be accessing your S3 bucket, take a look at our article on creating IAM user policies.

Creating a New IAM User

Already have an S3 bucket and an IAM user policy that allows a user to access it? Let's move on to creating the new user that will be used to access your S3 bucket.

1. From within your AWS account, access the Identity and Access Management (IAM) page.
2. On the left side menu, click on Users to access your IAM users.
   
   
   
   
3. Since we’ll be creating a new user, click on the Add User button at the top of the page.
   
   
   
   
4. The first screen in the process of creating a new IAM user requires you to set the user’s name and access type. Enter in your desired username into User Name field, then select Programmatic Access as the access type.
   
   
   
   
5. The next screen will allow you to configure permissions for the new user. Since we’re just creating a single user for accessing the bucket, select Attach existing policies directly.
   
   
   
   
6. You should now see a list of all available policies. Select the checkbox next to the policy that you've created for accessing your S3 bucket, then click on the Next: Tags button.
   
   
   
   
7. On the next screen, you have the option of adding tags to your user. For the purposes of this article, we won’t be adding any tags here and will be simply clicking on the Next: Review button to continue on.
   
   
   
   
8. You’ll now be presented with a summary of your user and permissions. If everything looks right, click on the Create User button to create the new user.
   
   
   
   
9. If the user was created successfully, you’ll be prompted with a success message along with your newly created user’s Access Key ID and Secret Access Key. Go ahead and copy these somewhere safe as you’ll to provide them when enabling Press3 on your account.
   
   

You should now have a user with the appropriate permissions for making changes to your S3 bucket.

Now that you have an S3 bucket and a user with access to it, you're ready to get started with Press3 as outlined in our introduction to Press3 article.