Lesson Sixteen

This video is going to show you a quick way to generate what’s called a pre-signed time-expiring URL using the third party tool called Bucket Explorer.

Since I’ve already opened this up before, I’ve got those credentials stored over here under quick connect, leastways unless I were to clear out history. I’m going to go ahead and click on Jane’s account here and that’s going to log me in under Jane’s account and get this guy out of the way here. Select that bucket because I need one of these objects down here to create one of those time-expiring URLs for.

This time-expiring URL is great for just about anything that you want only to be active for a certain amount of time, be it a few minutes, a few hours or a few days or a month. The first thing I want to do is I’ll select the object that I want to create this URL for. Come on up here to ACLs and make sure that no permissions are set, that it is made for private and by default they always are. In other words if you want to make this public, which kind of defeats the purpose of a time-expiring URL, meaning that it will never expire, then click on make public and it will check the read box for all users. We don’t want that. We want it totally secure, make private. But if you do make any changes here, click on update ACL but we didn’t so we’re good.

Now then that we’ve made sure that our ACLs are set to private, come on up here and click on web URL. Let’s go ahead and move this on up here so we can see what’s going on. Move this down here so we can see the actual clock going on right now. Over here on the left you have the various different types of URLs you can generate and on this box here shows you the default or the source URL and the one that’s going to be generated based on what we select over here and I want the signed URL, so go ahead and click on that radio button and you can also decide if you want http or https. This is actually the better option.

I’m just going to go ahead and stick with the default HTTP and by default it selects an expiring time and date of 24 hours from the time that you open up this panel. I’m going to go ahead and open up the date part and change this, yeah like that, and change that to 7 because today is the 7^th and right now it’s kind of sort of synchronized. The 1400 is military time for 2:00 and my clock says 2:30 and this says 2:29, almost 2:30, so I’m going to change that to about 2:33, 2:32, that will work.

That will give me about a minute or so to do some yapping.

And then with this set the way that I want, I want to make sure this box here is checked. Come on up here and check on generate URL and click on coy URL. Come on over here to the browser and paste that in here. Let me see, we’ve got just a little bit of time left and here is our image. Let’s come on back here to our bucket explorer, double check so I’ve got 2:32, almost 2:33.

Again this is not exactly synchronized with the time here so it might be off a little bit one way or the other. Let’s come on back to the browser and go ahead and refresh now. It’s still good. Depending upon the purpose behind why you’re making this expiring URL will depend on how long you would want it to be active.

If you’re sending it to somebody you know might check their email in a couple of hours or so, then go ahead and make it active for a full day or two but you might want to also let them know that this is an expiring URL, so if whenever you get to this URL and open it up in your browser and you get “request has expired” then you know why, but that’s exactly what happens. Whenever you send out an expiring URL, it’s going to be good for a certain amount of time and then at a pre-determined time, that URL is no longer any good whatsoever.

And that’s going to bring us to the end of this video on how easy it is to create a time-expiring URL using Bucket Explorer. Thanks for watching and you have a great day.