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One of the downsides of the ruby S3 example code is that it doesn’t support streaming of data (it loads the entire file into memory). It turns out, however, that all that is needed to stream data is a tweak to the ‘request’ method in Net::HTTP.

  require 'net/http'
require 'S3'
require 'pp'

#
# Replace the request method in Net::HTTP to sniff the body type
# and set the stream if appropriate
#
module Net
  class HTTP
    alias __request__ request

    def request(req, body = nil, &block)
      if body != nil && body.respond_to?(:read)
        req.body_stream = body
        return __request__(req, nil, &block)
      else
        return __request__(req, body, &block)
      end
    end
  end
end

#
# Connect to s3 using the ruby API provided by Amazon
#
conn = S3::AWSAuthConnection.new("[PUBLIC]", "[PRIVATE]", false)

#
# Stream a testfile to S3
#
open("testfile") do |stream|
  pp response = conn.put('BUCKET_NAME',
                         "testfile",
                         stream,
                         {
                           "x-amz-acl" => "public-read",
                           "Content-Type" => "text/plain",
                           "Content-Length" =>  FileTest.size("testfile").to_s
                         }
                        )
end

#
# Send a testfile in memory to S3
#
pp response = conn.put('BUCKET_NAME',
                       "testfile",
                       File.read('testfile'),
                       {
                         "x-amz-acl" => "public-read",
                         "Content-Type" => "text/plain"
                       }
                      )

  

A few notes about the code

• When streaming you have to supply the ‘Content-Length’ header
• I had an error about S3.rb calling strip on non-strings, I changed line 49 to ‘interesting_headers[lk] = value.to_s.strip’
• Make sure you replace PUBLIC, PRIVATE, and BUCKET_NAME with appropriate values

We have a couple of fairly high traffic sites that have large images designed to be used for desktop backgrounds. To save a bit of bandwidth, we decided to give Amazon’s S3 webservice a spin.

Signing up was fairly painless. They required a credit card (so they could bill us $.15/G storage and $.20/G transfer). After I signed up I quickly received an email that contained a link to my public and secret keys.

This is a fairly new service and the client tools are just getting started. For my purposes of uploading several images, I decided to use jSh3ll to ‘browse’ my S3 storage and a custom ruby script to upload a large amount of files.

After downloading and installing jSh3ll, I created my first bucket:
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