Question 22417 in SEO Question posted in
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Does an S3 bucket need to be Public to serve user viewable images to an app? – SEO

At the moment my Rails 6 React app has user uploaded images (avatars, profile wallpapers, etc) stored in S3, inside a public bucket for local development (not facilitated by active storage because it was not playing nice with vips for image processing). The reason its set to public was for ease of set up, now that all of the functionality is complete, for the stagging (and soon production) I would like to add sensible bucket policies. I don’t currently have CloudFront set up but I do intend to add that in the near term, for right now I’m using the bucket asset URL to serve assets. I have created two separate buckets, one for images that will be displayed in the app and one for content that is never to be publicly displayed which will be used for internal purposes.

The question I have is, for the content that is in the bucket reserved for viewable content, do I have to make it public (disable that setting in the AWS console that disables public access), then create a policy that allows GET request from wherever (*), then restriction POST, PUT, DELETE, requests to the arn ID of the EC2 instance that’s hosting the rails application. The AWS documentation has confused me, it gives me the impression that you never want to enable public access to a bucket, and that policies alone are how you surface bucket content. When I take that approach I keep getting access denied in the UI when I have attempted to do that.

EDIT:
I’m aware that signed URLs can be used, but it is my current understanding that there is a nontrivial speed hit to the UX of the application if you have to generate a signed URL for every image (this app is image heavy). There are also SEO concerns given that all the image URLs would effectively be temporary.

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    No it does not have to be public. If you don’t want to use CloudFront, the other option is to use S3 presigned RLs.

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  2. 0

    Objects in Amazon S3 are private by default. You can grant access to an object in several ways:

    • A Bucket Policy that can grant access to everyone (‘Public’), or to specific IP addresses or users
    • An IAM Policy on an IAM User or IAM Group that grants access to that user or group — however, they would need to access via an AWS SDK so that they can authenticate the call (eg when an application makes a request to S3, it would make an authenticated API call)
    • An Access Control List (ACL) on the object, which can make the object public without requiring the bucket to be public
    • By using an Amazon S3 pre-signed URL, which is a time-limited URL that provides temporary access to a private object

    Given your use-case, an S3 pre-signed URL would be the best choice since the content is kept private but the application can generate a link that provides temporary access to the object. This can also be done with CloudFront.

    Generating the pre-signed URL only takes a few lines of code and does not involve an API call to AWS. It is simply creating a hash of the request using your Secret Key, and then appending that hash as a ‘signature’. Therefore, there is effectively no speed impact of generating pre-signed URLs for all of your images.

    I don’t see how SEO would be impacted by using pre-signed URLs. Only actual web pages (HTML) are tracked in SEO — images are not relevant. Also, the URLs point to the normal image, but have some parameters at the end of the URL so they could be tracked the same as a non-signed URL.

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