Question

I have a post form that calls Amazon’s S3 service. I am doing a direct from browser upload to amazon, and thus have to pass some additional information to Amazon, that I will not know until the file is uploaded (file-type, name, ‘signature’ which references both). http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1434

It is a large video file, which I don’t want to upload to my server first, which (to the best of my knowledge) rules out using urllib2.open(...) to pass the additional variables to amazon as a POST request. I’ve been working at it for a couple days now, and haven’t had any success with it. What would be the best way to do this?

Note: I will probably be using the uploadify plugin to upload the file. Thank you.

Answer 1

You’re probably looking for Query String Request Authentication Alternative.

You can authenticate certain types of requests by passing the required
information as query-string parameters instead of using the
Authorization HTTP header. This is useful for enabling direct
third-party browser access to your private Amazon S3 data, without
proxying the request. The idea is to construct a “pre-signed” request
and encode it as a URL that an end-user’s browser can retrieve.
Additionally, you can limit a pre-signed request by specifying an
expiration time.