Amazon S3 - Cross Origin Resource Sharing Support

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/08/amazon-s3-cross-origin-resource-sharing.html

by jeffbarr • 14 years ago

164 44 14 years ago

aws.typepad.com

logical422• 14 years ago

oh my god it is about friggin' time.

nathancahill• 14 years ago

Yes! Fonts in Firefox will work now!

theli0nheart2• 14 years ago

Hah, about time.

About 6 months ago I rewrote the Let's Crate (https://letscrate.com) backend to work exclusively with Amazon S3 Direct POST uploads. Getting upload progress to work with that was a royal PITA, but in the end I got it working. If you're interested in how, perhaps that's a good subject for a far more lengthy post on how to write extremely convoluted Javascript. I gave myself a pat on the back (no flash, yay!) and vowed to never do anything like that again.

As requested: Basically, the gist is that you accept the upload via a local JS file that acts as a conduit. You then turn the dropped / selected file object into a blob object and transfer that blob JS file that lives on S3 (using postMessage and a hidden iframe). That JS file on S3 is what actually performs the upload and tracks the upload progress. On progress events, I send back postMessage payloads to the local JS file to show updates to the user.

Convoluted, but it works. :)

tectonic• 14 years ago

I'd really like to hear about how you did this. Any chance of open sourcing it?

theli0nheart2• 14 years ago

Sure! Although now that this is supported natively it seems like more of an academic exercise than anything else.

If any others have interest (reply to this comment if you do), I can turn it into a library and put it on Github.

btown• 14 years ago

I'd love it if you could write that blog post. The technique sounds like it could be used for a lot of things, including communication in the other direction, i.e. downloading images meant to be drawn on a canvas from servers that don't support CORS.

ajtaylor• 14 years ago

I'll soon be implementing image upload support where the images live on S3. It would be fantastic to be able to have the user's browser directly upload to S3 rather than go through the web server.

If you were to open source your code I'd love to learn from it.

tlrobinson• 14 years ago

How do you get access to the file to be uploaded in JavaScript? Are you using the HTML5 File API?

lyime• 14 years ago

Before upload yes. After uploaded, you have the URL.

dylanpyle• 14 years ago

I found this solution for a very similar problem, which is roughly the same approach:

http://dira.ro/2011/10/17/heroku-s3-canvas-and-the-security-...

Implementation here: https://github.com/dira/cross-domain-image-proxy

And a jQuery plugin here: https://github.com/rlmattax/jquery-s3-image-proxy

After weighing the pros and cons of proxying versus this, I settled on the postMessage strategy -- but still no fun at all, and I'm so glad that CORS is finally an option.

EthanEtienne2• 14 years ago

Here's one example from jquery file upload: https://github.com/ncri/s3_uploader_example

akoumjian• 14 years ago

It's been 3.5 long years since first feature request, but thank you!

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

OK, now how about CloudFront?

jeffbarr2• 14 years ago

I am researching that with the team as we speak. Need to make sure that the right headers are passed back from CloudFront to the S3 origin.

grandalf• 14 years ago

it works

ceejayoz3• 14 years ago

Thanks!

RoboTeddy• 14 years ago

Finally, I won't have to proxy s3 requests through my own nginxes.

I've pled for this feature in the AWS forum, over their commercial support (which I bought just to bug them about this), and to werner vogels directly.

Thanks jeffbarr!

jeffbarr2• 14 years ago

You are very welcome!

EthanEtienne2• 14 years ago

Thank you so much man, you saved me and my team a bunch of development next week. ABSOLUTELY PERFECT TIMING!! We used the iframe trick, but it sucked. This is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH better, thank you!!!!

aidos• 14 years ago

Funny, I had an email from the s3 team asking if I was in need of redirection support yesterday. I said I'd rather have CORS and SSL. So, SSL support next week, Jeff? :)

46Bit• 14 years ago

Awesome. Will this allow us to load images into canvas without security errors?

throw_away• 14 years ago

somewhat shocked they pushed Friday before the weekend.

notatoad• 14 years ago

pretty good strategy if you ask me. amazon has to have engineers working seven days a week anyways, if they push new stuff on a friday afternoon then it gets a couple days of low usage before all their customers get back to work on monday and try to implement it.

nickm12• 14 years ago

Sure, critical systems have round-the-clock coverage, but pushing big changes before the weekend is still not optimal. If there is an emergency, you'd rather have most of your workforce available, awake, and at work.

northband• 14 years ago

I prefer Friday launches. If crap hits the fan I would rather fix on Sat/Sun vs the Monday morning rush.

chao-• 14 years ago

As excited as I am about this finally happening, I was so pissed about having to deal with this issue over and over (e.g. JS files describing WebGL models), that I was on the verge of starting a service to provide the layer of redirection with CORS support, ala what Heroku does for EC2. I was actually getting a bit psyched for it, because I was convinced Amazon didn't care about ever implementing this.

At least now I won't launch something only to have Amazon eat my lunch when they finally came around to providing this much-needed feature.

petervandijck• 14 years ago

Adding a feature people want to AWS isn't a business, they'll always launch it eventually :)

purephase• 14 years ago

This must have been difficult to work out. My thanks (or condolences?) to Amazon for this. It will make my life a bit easier!

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

Great.

Could somebody explain CORS to me? How is making the server you're contacting specify it wants to receive requests, in the response header, secure? The request has already been made!

muriithi• 14 years ago

If the request is made by a web page from a different server it would ordinarily be rejected because of the same origin policy.

Using CORS allows you to specify which servers you can accept requests from unless of course you are using ; Access-Control-Allow-Origin: *

More info ; https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/HTTP_access_control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-origin_resource_sharing

TazeTSchnitzel3• 14 years ago

Doesn't it keep a risk of XSS attacks though, since the CORS policy is only disovered AFTER the request is made?

rhmontv• 14 years ago

Can anybody Show me an working example of a working html/JavaScript script which uploads to S3 directly over html. Never worked with html5 Upload before. Where can i get more information how this will work? Is it a normal form send with additional fields for authentication? I really have no clue and would be very happy to be pointed into right direction.

Thanks in advance

jeromeparadis• 14 years ago

Great timing. I recently began working on a project where I ran into the problem of cross-domain fonts in Firefox trying to serve static assets from S3 to CloudFront. Had to resort using my own nginx proxy through CloudFront for fonts and add an additional request to the page. Finally, problem solved!

Amazon S3 - Cross Origin Resource Sharing Support

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