Struggling to Download Sentinel-2 Level 1C `.SAFE` Files with Python and AWS CLI

TL;DR

I initially struggled to download the full Sentinel-2 Level 1C .SAFE package (with metadata) for ACOLITE atmospheric correction.
The solution, kindly shared by my friend Luis Sadeck, was to configure S3 access keys directly in my Copernicus Data Space account.
👉 You don’t need an AWS account for this — just generate your access_key and secret_key inside your Data Space profile, then use them when accessing the S3 bucket.
Docs: Copernicus Data Space S3 API
Now the entire process works smoothly with a single Python library. 🎉
Big thanks to everyone who reached out with suggestions and support!

I’ve been trying to download Sentinel-2 Level 1C data programmatically with Python, instead of manually going to the Sentinel Hub website. The goal is to get the entire .SAFE package, including metadata, so I can later run atmospheric correction with ACOLITE.

So far, here’s what I’ve tried:

Attempt 1: Using the sentinelhub Python library

With the sentinelhub Python package, I was able to find the asset I needed. It even provides an href pointing to the AWS S3 bucket for the .SAFE product:

s3://EODATA/Sentinel-2/MSI/L1C_N0500/2023/01/15/S2B_MSIL1C_20230115T133829_N0510_R124_T21HWD_20240728T040848.SAFE/

At first, this looked promising. But when I tried downloading the data with the AWS CLI, I only got the bands and a few additional elements — not the full .SAFE structure.

Unfortunately, that’s a problem: ACOLITE requires all metadata, not just the imagery.

Attempt 2: Using STAC from Copernicus Dataspace

Next, I tried going through the Copernicus Dataspace STAC API.

This was encouraging: it actually lists the full .SAFE structure, and I can see hrefs for each element. So it looked like the full dataset might be accessible.

However, when I attempted to download it using the AWS CLI, I ran into issues. Here’s the command I used:

aws s3 cp --recursive \
  s3://eodata/Sentinel-2/MSI/L1C_N0500/2023/01/15/S2B_MSIL1C_20230115T133829_N0510_R124_T21HWD_20240728T040848.SAFE/GRANULE/L1C_T21HWD_A030609_20230115T135051/IMG_DATA/T21HWD_20230115T133829_B01.jp2 \
  ./S2B_MSIL1C_20230115T133829_N0510_R124_T21HWD_20240728T040848.SAFE/ \
  --request-payer requester

Has anyone successfully managed to download the entire Sentinel-2 Level 1C .SAFE package, including metadata, directly through Python or AWS CLI, in a way that works for running ACOLITE atmospheric correction?

Any hints, scripts, or alternative approaches would be hugely appreciated!