How to upload files directly to Amazon S3 from a remote server?

Question

Is it possible to upload a file to S3 from a remote server?

The remote server is basically a URL based file server. Example, using http://example.com/1.jpg, it serves the image. It doesn't do anything else and can't run code on this server.

It is possible to have another server telling S3 to upload a file from http://example.com/1.jpg

           upload from http://example.com/1.jpg 
server -------------------------------------------> S3 <-----> example.com

Answer 1

If you can't run code on the server or execute requests then, no, you can't do this. You will have to download the file to a server or computer that you own and upload from there.

You can see the operations you can perform on amazon S3 at http://docs.amazonwebservices.com/AmazonS3/latest/API/APIRest.html

Checking the operations for both the REST and SOAP APIs you'll see there's no way to give Amazon S3 a remote URL and have it grab the object for you. All of the PUT requests require the object's data to be provided as part of the request. Meaning the server or computer that is initiating the web request needs to have the data.

I have had a similar problem in the past where I wanted to download my users' Facebook Thumbnails and upload them to S3 for use on my site. The way I did it was to download the image from Facebook into Memory on my server, then upload to Amazon S3 - the full thing took under 2 seconds. After the upload to S3 was complete, write the bucket/key to a database.

Unfortunately there's no other way to do it.

Answer 2

I think the suggestion provided is quite good, you can SCP the file to S3 Bucket. Giving the pem file will be a password less authentication, via PHP file you can validate the extensions. PHP file can pass the file, as argument to SCP command.

The only problem with this solution is, you must have your instance in AWS. You can't use this solution if your website is hosted in other Hosting Providers and you are trying to upload files straight to S3 Bucket.