Is there a way to directly upload files to S3 using pre-signed URL?

modu · May 28, 2024, 11:59pm

I knew parse server about 8 years ago. I didn’t start look into it until a couple of days ago.

I did some research, but didn’t find any documentation or article that shows how to directly upload files from, say, an iOS mobile app to an S3 compatible service using a pre-signed URL.

I happened to see this post from 2017 on Github. FEATURE REQUEST: Support for direct uploading of files to S3 · Issue #3530 · parse-community/parse-server · GitHub
Not sure what the intent of the original author is. However, that sounds similar to what I’m looking for.

I found this related doc from AWS S3: Work with Amazon S3 pre-signed URLs - AWS SDK for Java 2.x

dplewis · May 29, 2024, 8:47pm

This should be a feature in the S3 adapter

github.com/parse-community/parse-server-s3-adapter

feat: Add option to generate pre-signed URL with expiration time

parse-community:master ← andrewalc:feature/presigned-url

opened 08:03PM - 29 Mar 23 UTC

andrewalc

+180 -50

Addresses: - https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server-s3-adapter/issues/…78 PR branched off of: - https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server-s3-adapter/pull/117/ Updated test with refactoring request that was mentioned here: https://github.com/parse-community/parse-server-s3-adapter/pull/117/files#r676915013

modu · May 29, 2024, 10:29pm

Hi dplewis, thanks for the answer. I’m not really a backend guy.

I had tried parse server with the s3 adapter a little bit, before I created the post here.
And I had tried the presigned URL option as well. That seemed to be only for downloading files.

What I am looking for is uploading.

For example, in this scenario, currently how upload works seems to be:
Mobile app → parse server → s3

I guess for some use cases, this is fine.

However, if the user of the mobile app has lots of file to upload and the parse server doesn’t have enough bandwidth, it would be nice to directly upload files from the mobile app to s3.