Lesson Nine

In this video I’m going to show you a quick way to generate what’s called a pre-signed time-expiring URL using the third party tool called Cloudberry S3 Explorer.

Basically what’s going to happen with this type of a URL is that it’s good for only a certain amount of time that you designate. After that time is gone, then the URL no longer works, so it’s a nice secure way to keep the permissions of the content within your S3 bucket totally secure and private while delivering that content by way of a URL and oddly enough there’s no way to do that same type of thing inside of your Amazon Web Services console unless you’re able to write code to do that. In other words there’s no magic button inside of your AWS account that allows you to click something here, click something there and spits out a URL that will expire at a certain time. You need to use a third party UI or user interface or tool as I call it, like for example Cloudberry S3 Explorer, Cyberduck or Bucket Explorer, but in this video we’re going to use Cloudberry S3 Explorer.

Let’s go ahead and open up our Cloudberry S3 Explorer and I’ve already attached Joe’s demo as we have covered in a previous video and what I’m going to do is create a time-expiring URL for this image right here. The first thing you want to do is make sure that the permissions or the ACLs are set to private only. Let’s go ahead and right click on this. Come on down here and left click on ACL. You can do the same thing right up here, I believe that’s one with the key in it. Select it. Yes it’s the one with the key on it right there. In either case you’ll end up with the same spot, right here. And here you want to make sure that none of the boxes here are checked except for this top row and just to make doubly sure, just click on private and make sure that nothing else is checked because if you wanted everybody to have access to it, you would click on public and I would check all users read, that box right there. We don’t want that. Again make sure it’s private, click on okay, and then we need to generate a URL, so we can either select it and then come on up here and click on web URL or right click and come on down here and click on web URL. You’ll end up on the same spot right here.

Now then this is the URL as it stands, the source URL, that will not get you anywhere because it is set to private and it is not going to work, so what we need to do is come on up here and check both of these boxes. You really don’t need to check this top box. I’m just going to go ahead and check that so we will generate a short URL using chilp.it. You don’t need this but if you don’t have this box checked, then the URL is going to be very long, like 3 or 4 line URL, which may not work if you’re sending this out via email, so we’re going to check that one and by default it’s set to expire 1 week from the time that you open up this panel.

I’m not going to ask you to wait around for a week while I demonstrate if this thing’s going to work or not. Let’s go ahead and click on the calendar icon here and select the day that I want this to expire and over here to the right I want to set the time I want this to expire and right now we’re looking at 7:18. Now these are not exactly synchronized. There are a few seconds off, one way or the other, so I’m going to go ahead and set this by just selecting the minutes section to let’s say 20, that gives me a few seconds to yammer on a little bit more and then just click outside of the box and click on generate. And there is our shortened URL. Copy that to the clipboard, close this up, come on up here, open up a new tab and paste that URL right in here. Hit enter and here’s the image.