Amazon S3 expiring URLs with Boto

This is a short post. I spent too long working this out so hopefully this post will help a future Google search.

If you’re using the Boto python wrapper for the Amazon S3 service, you can quickly generate temporary URLs for your private files.

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from boto.s3.connection import S3Connection
 
s3 = S3Connection('YOUR_KEY', 'YOUR_SECRET', is_secure=False)
url = s3.generate_url(60, 'GET', bucket='YOUR_BUCKET', key='YOUR_FILE_KEY', force_http=True)

This will give you a URL to your private file on S3 that will only work for 60 seconds. It will look something like this:

http://mycoolbucket.s3.amazonaws.com/myfile.jpg?

Signature=ABC123DEF456&
Expires=1312216031&
AWSAccessKeyId=ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP