S3 + CloudFront Distribution -- How to Protect My Assets Folder - amazon-web-services

I have a severless website that I am quite happy with. Unfortunately, there are files in my assets folder that I would rather not be served, and I am not sure how to achieve this.
As an example, S3 bucket mywebsite.com has several HTML files and an assets folder. If I go to mywebsite.com/assets/images/image.png CloudFront serves it up.
This isn't too concerning. But some of the JS stuff with API endpoints, etc should not exposed like this.
Any advice is much appreciated.
Sincerely,
ngp

Related

Possible to alias a download link (to file in AWS S3 bucket): ".../Foo_v1.0.13" <-- ".../FooLatest"?

This seems like something that happens often enough that there might already be some provision for doing it that I'm not aware of...
Users of our app download our installer package via a link on our site that points to the file hosted in an S3 bucket on AWS. Once installed, our app uses the same (hard-coded) URL to download and install updates when they become available.
One downside to this is that it requires that the download URL be static, and thus it can't contain any version information.
If we were hosting the download on our own (configurable) web server, I'd have an idea of how to set up a redirect from https://.../Foo_Latest to https://.../Foo_v1.0.13, and we could just manage the alias in that one place?
But since we upload new releases to an S3 bucket on AWS, I'm wondering whether there's not some existing capability on AWS to alias the URL. It seems like this might be a common enough use case that there's some solution already in place for doing this?
Of course, we could just have the static URL point to a server we control, and then do the redirect there to the AWS URL. But that feels like it would somewhat defeat the purpose of using high-availability and high-bandwidth benefits of AWS...
Am I missing anything?

can someone guide me on the use case for serving media files via uploadcare vs amazon S3 vs other solutions?

I am trying to make a django application (with the Rest framework) and I was just researching and came across different ways to serve media files.
what is the recommended approach for a project/app that lets you upload pictures so that other users can download them?
I came across CDN such as uploadcare, cloudinary and then ofcourse amazon S3 as well. Is there a difference in using these services like uploadcare vs S3 in terms of speed or scaling?
thanks in advance,

DJango use templates from seperrate AWS S3 Bucket

I have a Django server running in an elastic beanstalk environment. I would like to have it render HTML templates pulled from a separate AWS S3 Bucket.
I am using the Django-storages library, which lets me use static and media files from the bucket, but I can't figure out how to get it to render templates.
The reasoning for doing it like this is that once my site is running, I would like to be able to add these HTML templates without having to redeploy the entire site.
Thank you
To my best knowledge, Django-storages is responsible for managing static assets and media files, it doesn't mount the S3 bucket to the file system, what you might be looking for is something like S3Fuse which will mount the bucket on the File System, which will allow you to update the template and have them sync. This might not be the best solution because even if you got the sync to work, Django might not pick those changes and serve the templates from memory.
I believe what you're looking for is a Continuous Delivery pipeline, that way you won't be worried about hosting.
Good Question though.

Setting up a CDN with Wagtail CMS

I am looking into possibly setting up a CDN to use with my Wagtail sites. I am thinking that this will be a more efficient way to manage media uploads during stage/production pushes, since right now the media folder has to be manually copied from server to server on deploy. If all of the images were being accessed from a CDN then this wouldn't be an issue.
This would be my first time using a CDN so I'm looking for advice. There is lots of info on using a CDN with WordPress, but not a lot of documentation on setting one up with Wagtail/Django. I have the following questions about it:
Does anyone have any suggestions on the best way to implement the CDN with Wagtail?
How does it handle the uploads that the user submits through the CMS? Most of the images will be uploaded as part of the static files, but how does it work when the user uploads a photo as part of a post?
Which CDN companies have you had the best/worst experiences with? The sites I am planning to use this for are professional/business, but not e-commerce.
Also, if there is a more efficient way to handle the transfer of media uploads from one environment to another than using a CDN, I'd love to hear your suggestions for that too. As of right now I've had to copy the media folder over after doing the deploy, and I will have to do this every time I make a change to the site.
Thanks in advance for your assistance.
The following resources can be helpful for your required setup in Wagtail (later on today I can provide you some more details):
Frontend cache invalidator for pages (so not only for static and media files)
Link: http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/reference/contrib/frontendcache.html#frontendcache-aws-cloudfront
Storing media files in Amazon Web Services S3 buckets
This should be a better solution instead of copying media files from server to server. In this case Amazon Web Services CloudFront (CDN) would be a perfect choice.
Link: https://django-storages.readthedocs.io/en/latest/backends/amazon-S3.html#amazon-s3
More info CloudFront: https://aws.amazon.com/cloudfront/
Static file cache invalidation with Django Whitenoise
Can be relevant to clear the cache for a new deployment (the static files will have a unique filename so CDN will have a new file cache from its origin after the deployment)
Link: http://whitenoise.evans.io/en/stable/django.html
CloudFront from AWS will have my personal choice for CDN. Besides the awesome resources/services AWS has to offer, CloudFront is simple to setup and has one of the best CDN's out there.
Finally a CDN for serving static- and media files has nothing to do with Wagtail specifically. There are some (see list above) nice apps available for Django itself, but you are free to choose another CDN solution (like Cloudflare).
So setting up a AWS S3 Bucket for each environment (tst/acc/stg/prd) and use it for uploading you media files (so the files aren't on the server anymore) and setup a CloudFront distribution for these buckets would be a proper solution for your problem.
Best regards,
Rob Moorman

How to set metadata while compressing files using gzip?

I'm hosting a static website on Amazon S3. It's basically a theme with all static files (HTML, CSS, JS & Image files)
Everything works fine. I've also activated Cloudfront. But the site is still sluggish and very slow while loading. So I wanted to gzip the content & started to follow this doc Serving Compressed Files from Amazon S3
But the part where I've to go to 2000+ files and update Metadata as "Content-Encoding" as "gzip" is too tedious and isn't practical for me.
Is there a way I can add this metadata while I compress the files using gzip.exe on my local system?
Or any other workaround?
Please guide me. I'm stuck. :(