Proxying Amazon AWS S3 Pre-Signed-URL Uploads Using CFHTTP And Lucee CFML 5.3.6.61

At InVision, when a user goes to upload a screen for an interactive prototype, we have the browser upload the file directly to S3 using a pre-signed URL. We’ve been using this technique for years and it’s worked perfectly well. However, we now have an Enterprise client whose network is blocking all calls to Amazon AWS. As such, they are unable to use pre-signed URLs for their file uploads. To try and get around this issue, I wanted to see what it would take to proxy uploads to Amazon AWS S3 through our application using the tag and Lucee CFML 5.3.6.61.

ASIDE: This isn’t the first time that I’ve looked at proxying files through ColdFusion. A few years ago, I created a fun little project called “Sticky CDN”, which was a content-delivery network (CDN) designed for your local development environment. It was intended to cache remote files on the local file-system. My current article uses the foundational concepts from that CDN project.
To explore this concept, the first thing that I did was go into the ColdFusion code that generates the S3 pre-signed (query-string authenticated) URL, intercept the response payload, and then redirect the URLs through my local development server. In the following truncated snippet, the “data” payload contains a collection of pre-signed URLs that the browser will use when uploading the files directly to S3:

#coldfusion #work #aws