AccessDenied for ListObjectsV2 operation for S3 bucket

I had this problem recently. No matter what I did, no matter what permissions I provided, I kept getting "An error occurred (AccessDenied) when calling the ListObjectsV2 operation: Access Denied" when running aws s3 ls <bucket>

I had forgotten that I have multiple aws profiles configured in my environment. The aws command was using the default profile, which has a different set of access keys. I had to specify the --profile flag to the command:

aws s3 ls <bucket> --profile <correct profile>

That worked. It's a niche situation, but maybe it'll help someone out.


I'm not sure the accepted answer is actually acceptable, as it simply allows all operations on the bucket. Also the Sid is misleading... ;-)

This AWS article mentions the required permissions for aws s3 sync.

This is how a corresponding policy looks like:

{
"Version": "version_id",
"Statement": [
    {
        "Sid": "AllowBucketSync",
        "Effect": "Allow",
        "Action": [
            "s3:GetObject", 
            "s3:PutObject", 
            "s3:ListBucket"
        ],
        "Resource": [
            "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET-NAME",
            "arn:aws:s3:::BUCKET-NAME/*"
        ]
    }
] }

I got "AccessDenied" errors, too, even though the policy was correct. I gave mrbranden's solution a try though I only have one (the default) credentials configured. And lo and behold,

$ aws s3 ls <bucket> --profile=default

made it work!

My aws --version is aws-cli/1.18.69 Python/3.8.5 Linux/5.4.0-1035-aws botocore/1.16.19