Michael Dyrynda: Uploading files to Amazon S3 from the browser - Part One

Michael Dyrynda has a tutorial posted to his site starting off a new series showing how to create the functionality in your application to upload files to Amazon S3 from the browser. The tutorial is designed for those that don't already have something in their framework that allows for this upload handling.

I recently took on a freelance project that involved having to upload media files. This is a trivially simple task to accomplish if you're using something like Laravel, using out-of-the-box support for S3 storage.

In this particular case, however, I was dealing with files potentially multiple gigabytes in size. Although a simpler to implement, I didn't want to have to have users of the site upload the file to my application - and thus server - before having my server re-upload the file to S3.

In his case, he needed something that would allow for the upload of very large files without having to pass it through the backend server to get there. He starts by walking you through the setup on the S3 side, creating an IAM policy for the upload and a form that points to the instance. The form includes a "key" value that contains the filename for the end result. He also shows some of the other options that can be included like the policy to use a redirect location and a signature to verify the upload. He then shows the code required to make it work, creating an upload route and a main form page that generates the signature and policy information for the form based on configuration options.