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Share files from a bucket with presign keys

Purpose

AWS presigned URLs (or presign keys) are used to grant temporary access to objects in Amazon S3 without requiring the recipient to have AWS security credentials. Here are the main purposes:

  • Download Access: You can generate a presigned URL to allow someone to download an object from your S3 bucket without needing their own AWS credentials
  • Upload Access: Similarly, you can create a presigned URL to permit someone to upload a specific object to your S3 bucket
  • Time-Limited Access: The access provided by a presigned URL is time-limited, meaning it will expire after a specified duration

This is particularly useful for sharing files securely or allowing temporary uploads without exposing your AWS credentials.

Warning: only files can be shared this way, so if you want to share a folder, you have to create an archive of this folder first.

Prerequisite

The bucket has to be opened on the outside, if it's not the case, send an email to helpdesk@unil.ch with the subject starting with "DCSR S3 bucket".

Create a presign key with aws-cli

You can either install awscli on your laptop since it's a simple Python package, or use it from the cluster (there is a module called awscli-v2 that you can simploy load).

Configuration

If it's not configured yet, you can run aws configure command. This will ask you for:

  • AWS Access Key ID: you have to provide the read/write access key corresponding to your bucket
  • AWS Secret Access Key: you have to provide the read/write secret key corresponding to your bucket
  • Default region name: you can put us-east-1
  • Default output format: you can put json

This will create two files:

  • ~/.aws/config
  • ~/.aws/credentials

Presign key creation

Let's consider that you want the file to_share/important_file.gz from the bucket recn-fac-fbm-dep-greatpi-data, you can use the following command: 

aws --endpoint-url=https://s3.unil.ch s3 presign \
    s3://recn-fac-fbm-dep-greatpi-data/to_share/important_file.gz \
    --expires-in 604800

The value defined with --expires-in parameter is the validity of the link expressed in seconds. The maximum validity is 7 days.

This command will return a link that can be shared with your external collaborator.

Create a presign key with Cyberduck

Once your connection to the bucket is configured with Cyberduck, you can browse it. Then right click to file you want to share, then choose "Copy URL", and choose one of the 3 expiration options (1 hour, 1 day, 1 week). Finally, just paste the result somewhere to get the link.

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