So ... how to I access private files within Object Storage?
I guess I must be dumb - but am I wrong in thinking that I can hold media files, set as private, in an Akamai Object Storage and let my users access them through some type of authorization?
I have a iPad app that plays videos which are for pay. I want to provide access to them after the users purchase an "album". I thought that I would be able to set up a privately authenticated url and do that - so, at lease, create sometime of handshake to auth.
After some research, my best guess is to route them through my server as a proxy and authenticate in some roundabout way. There seems to be a lot of documentation about s3cmd - but, really, why go through all this trouble? Seems like a gratuitously ornate way to host files.
But if there is a simple, more direct way - there is not a single doc on the Internet (much less Alkamai) that details how to use this.
Thanks for reading - sorry for the snark - but I really think I am missing a foundational use case for this.
5 Replies
✓ Best Answer
Assuming you want to keep the files private, your app will need to generate signed URLs (sometimes referred to as "pre-signed URLs") which allow access to the file for a specific period of time.
There's lots of existing code for generating the URLs. I tend to write in Perl, so I use https://metacpan.org/pod/Amazon::S3::SignedURLGenerator
Most documentation and code for generating signed URLs with Amazon S3 should be relevant to Linode too.
If your app communicates with with a server that you control, then I'd suggest having the code to generate the signed URLs on that server and have your app get the signed URLs via an API (otherwise you'd probably need to embed a Linode Object Storage access key in your app).
@davepattern First of all, thanks for the reply.
Ok thanks for grounding - I get it … makes sense - now I see how that works. I have alot of questions - but let me see what The Google can tell me. And heck, I’ll even see what ChatGPT says for added context.
Thanks so much!
That's great to hear!
I'm doing something similar on a site that has scans of old local history books. The page images are private files on Object Storage because I want to discourage other people from hot linking directly to the files and mooching off my bandwidth allowance. The files are displayed using a JavaScript app that requests each file via an API, e.g. page 1 of book ID 20021:
https://huddersfield.exposed/api/content/books/pages/20021/1.jpg
…the API logs the request (so I can track which books are accessed the most), generates a signed URL to the file on Object Storage, and issues a 302 redirect to that URL. In theory, someone could hot link to the above URL, but at least I'd be able to track it and then I could choose to tweak my API to block them.
Dave
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