Feature Request: Support Configurable S3 Bucket List via Environment Variable

[parambath92]

The current IGV S3 integration has two issues when using Amazon → Load from S3 bucket:

1. Permission Requirements: Requires s3:ListAllMyBuckets IAM permission, which many enterprise environments cannot grant due to security policies requiring least-privilege access
2. Performance Issues: When AWS accounts have 500+ buckets, listing and navigating the bucket selection UI becomes slow and cumbersome

Proposed Solution
Add support for an environment variable (e.g., IGV_S3_BUCKETS) that allows users to specify a list of allowed S3 buckets:
export IGV_S3_BUCKETS="bucket1,bucket2,bucket3"

Behavior:

• If the environment variable is set: Display only the specified buckets (no s3:ListAllMyBuckets call required)
• If not set: Use current behavior (list all accessible buckets)

Benefits

• Eliminates need for s3:ListAllMyBuckets permission
• Improves performance by avoiding API calls and reducing UI clutter
• Better user experience showing only relevant buckets
• Fully backward compatible with existing deployments

Use Case

Enterprise deployments where:

• IAM roles have access to specific buckets only
• Security policies prohibit broad listing permissions
• AWS accounts contain hundreds of buckets across multiple teams

Can this be taken up as a feature request? We would like to contribute to this fearure if there's interest.

[jrobinso]

Yes this would be useful. But I suggest using IGV preferences instead of an environment variable. IGV preferences are platform independent, and do not require special privileges to set. Not everyone is able to set environment variables, particularly on Windows.

If you're interested in working on this here are the basic steps. Adding a preference involves

• Adding an entry in src/main/resources/preferences.tab, probably right after the AWS_ENDPOINT_URL entry at line 301
• Adding a corresponding property in org.prefs.Constants.java

After the preference has been added it can be accessed as follows

        String s3BucketsList = PreferencesManager.getPreferences().get(AWS_S3_BUCKETS);
        if (s3BucketsList != null) {
            String[] buckets = Globals.commaPattern.split(s3BucketsList);
             ...
        }