A simple application which uploads files to Amazon S3 via direct upload without proxying the files through the own server. The files in the bucket can then be downloaded (or displayed) by a signed URL directly from S3 again.
For uploading a policy is needed which pre-authorizes the upload.
The Client requests this policy beside other information from the node server which provides the data.
After performing an Ajax Request to the server the client fills out the hidden form input fields following: http://aws.amazon.com/articles/1434 and submits the form which gets send directly to Amazon S3.
For the files already in the bucket the server creates a signed URL for the file. This is done with the npm module knox. The file list is requested via an ajax call from the server and appended to the document.
Using Twitter Bootstrap to give it a nice layout.
Using jQuery's ajax for the ajax calls.
To use this demo create your own config.json file following the sampleConfig.json file.
Create a AWS Account, create Credentials and set up a S3 bucket
Create your own config.json file
Install the modules via npm install in the project folder
Start the app via node app.js
As the form submit gets a Status Code of 204 the page is not refreshed and no event can be catched. You have to reload the page instead. I added a route "files/:file" which forwards requests to a specific file to S3. This is not used in the example but is a simpler interface than ajax.
There is CORS Support for S3 now which provides better methods in order to GET, PUT, UPDATE and DELETE Objects. You can keep track of the uploading and get better response.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonS3/latest/dev/cors.html
http://blog.tcs.de/post-file-to-s3-using-node/