Creating Signed URLs for Amazon CloudFront

Asked 2010-04-04T08:31:37.210

33

Short version: How do I make signed URLs "on-demand" to mimic Nginx's X-Accel-Redirect behavior (i.e. protecting downloads) with Amazon CloudFront/S3 using Python.

I've got a Django server up and running with an Nginx front-end. I've been getting hammered with requests to it and recently had to install it as a Tornado WSGI application to prevent it from crashing in FastCGI mode.

Now I'm having an issue with my server getting bogged down (i.e. most of its bandwidth is being used up) due to too many requests for media being made to it, I've been looking into CDNs and I believe Amazon CloudFront/S3 would be the proper solution for me.

I've been using Nginx's X-Accel-Redirect header to protect the files from unauthorized downloading, but I don't have that ability with CloudFront/S3--however they do offer signed URLs. I'm no Python expert by far and definitely don't know how to create a Signed URL properly, so I was hoping someone would have a link for how to make these URLs "on-demand" or would be willing to explain how to here, it would be greatly appreciated.

Also, is this the proper solution, even? I'm not too familiar with CDNs, is there a CDN that would be better suited for this?

python cdn amazon-cloudfront

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secretmike's answer works, but it is better to use rsa instead of M2Crypto.

I used boto which uses rsa.

import boto
from boto.cloudfront import CloudFrontConnection
from boto.cloudfront.distribution import Distribution

expire_time = int(time.time() +3000)
conn = CloudFrontConnection('ACCESS_KEY_ID', 'SECRET_ACCESS_KEY')

##enter the id or domain name to select a distribution
distribution = Distribution(connection=conn, config=None, domain_name='', id='', last_modified_time=None, status='')
signed_url = distribution.create_signed_url(url='YOUR_URL', keypair_id='YOUR_KEYPAIR_ID_example-APKAIAZVIO4BQ',expire_time=expire_time,private_key_file="YOUR_PRIVATE_KEY_FILE_LOCATION")

Use the boto documentation

answered 2013-06-17T04:50:07.393

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