The AWS console is great until you want to give someone a read-only link to a single bucket. Then it’s terrible: you have to mint an IAM user or a federated role, walk them through the console, scope it down, deal with their MFA, and so on. All they wanted was to browse a folder.

s3xplorer started as a weekend POC to play with the AWS Go SDK v2 and the minio client, and turned into the tool I now use to expose a bucket to humans without giving them AWS credentials.

gitlab-backup2s3: Encrypted GitLab Backups to S3, with Kubernetes Support

Source code: github.com/sgaunet/gitlab-backup2s3 Helm chart: github.com/sgaunet/helm-gitlab-backup2s3

In the previous article, I covered gitlab-backup, a CLI tool for exporting GitLab projects and groups as portable archives. It handles the export, the restore, and supports both local and S3 storage natively.

But for production backup workflows — especially in a Kubernetes environment — you often want more: scheduled execution, optional encryption at rest, and a container image that bundles everything together. That’s exactly what gitlab-backup2s3 brings to the table.

gitlab-backup: Back Up and Restore GitLab Projects from the Command Line

Source code: github.com/sgaunet/gitlab-backup

When you self-host GitLab or rely heavily on gitlab.com for your projects, having an independent backup strategy is essential. GitLab’s own backup mechanism works well at the instance level, but sometimes you need something more surgical: back up a single project, or an entire group, on demand, and store the result locally or in S3. That’s what gitlab-backup does.