AWS Archives

Uploading Directly to Amazon S3 with Dropzone and PHP

Posted March 16th, 2018 (Updated 13 Aug 2019) in Javascript, PHP

Dropzone is a really nice lightweight javascript upload library with drag drop support and a high level of customisability. The documentation for direct uploads to Amazon S3 with a PHP backend are entirely lacking though so I’ve whipped up a complete tutorial on how to make it happen. For this tutorial I’ll be using Laravel but the script is very simple and any PHP backend will work.

What You’ll Need

AWS Access Key
AWS Secret Key
AWS Region
AWS Bucket Name

As part of Laravel I’m using dotenv to store these values and retrieving them with getenv() but they can be stored as config variables or any other method you like.

Setting up Dynamic DNS to your Home with Route 53

Posted December 8th, 2015 in Linux, PHP

Isn’t it annoying when you want to connect to your home network while out and about but don’t know what your IP is? Sick of dynamic DNS sites with arbitrary restrictions on their free tiers? Well look no further! This tutorial demonstrates how to point your home IP to a subdomain of your website using a simple PHP script.

The Concept

Set up a Route 53 subdomain for pointing to your home
A device in your home uses a scheduled task to ping a URL on your website
That URL grabs the IP hitting it and points your subdomain to the IP.

How to Schedule Daily Rolling EBS Snapshots

Posted June 18th, 2015 (Updated 2 Aug 2016) in Linux

I want to schedule backups of my Ubuntu EC2’s EBS on a daily rolling schedule – ie a backup will occur once each day, and after 7 days the oldest snapshot is deleted – so there will always be 1 weeks worth of backups.

Read on for the implementation.

How to Load WordPress Assets Through Amazon CloudFront Automatically

Posted August 16th, 2014 (Updated 17 Jan 2015) in PHP

If you want your WordPress site to handle large traffic spikes, loading as many assets as possible from a third party server is a no-brainer. One of the ways to do this is by pointing all asset URLs to a subdomain and having that subdomain load through a service like CloudFront using origin pull. This is done in 3 steps:

Create the CloudFront distribution
Add the subdomain to your DNS
The use of a poorly documented WordPress constant.

In this tutorial I’ll be moving all my sites assets from www.flynsarmy.com to static.flynsarmy.com.

Upload to Amazon S3 with Uploadify

Posted March 20th, 2011 (Updated 7 Nov 2011) in Javascript, PHP

Update Jul 02 2011: crossdomains.xml should be crossdomain.xml
Update Jun 29 2011: Updated S3 upload URL – no more security error

If you’ve ever wanted to allow people on your website to upload files to Amazon S3, you’ll know the only real way to do this is with flash – as it allows the client to upload directly instead of funneling all traffic through your server. You could write your own script for this, however there’s already a nifty little prebuilt tool I’m sure you’ve already heard of called Uploadify which can not only do the job for you, it can do so with great flexability.

For the lazy: Download the entire script here