Protect download file rails from url






















This article was first posted on my personal blog. Especially if the files are big. That is good idea and using with as a context manager is more better and looks great. Mobile App Development. Programming Languages. Get insights on scaling, management, and product development for founders and engineering managers.

Read programming tutorials, share your knowledge, and become better developers together. Hot Topics. Avi Aryan Follow. Published Apr 17, Getting filename from URL We can parse the url to get the filename.

Python Requests Http File download Scripts. I am a freelance developer currently working at Toptal and Udacity. I expertise in full stack web development. I have been programming for 6 years and I believe in code sanity as much as anything. Now your users can access their images that they have purchased.

It's time for us to add a download function activated by that link. That means that they are just available for clicking and downloading. Of course, we want to secure our files so they can only be downloaded by those that have access to them after purchase. So let's look at how we can secure our files, and still have them able to be downloaded.

It has a default path for the application to store its file. We don't want our files to be downloadable by the general public, so we need to change this configuration, let's update our Image model:. Now our file will be stored in a section of the server that is not open to the outside world.

This does present us with a new problem though, how do we display a preview of it in the browser if we want? A quick way to do this to add a route to our app so Rails can serve the image for us.

This is not normally recommended as Rails serving static files is not what you would normally want in production, but you should be able to either cache it or with some extra configuration have nginx or Apache still serve the file for you. To get this working in development though, let's just have Rails serve. A good way to get things built is to get them working first, then make them better. This way you can always have a fallback point of a working feature, even if the code isn't as optimal as you'd like.

Now that we have a URL that can be used to get an image, we need to map it to our Paperclip attachment:. Now we just need a controller action:. Last but not least, letting our users download any images that they have purchased. We have our link and our route for them to download their file, we just need to add a controller action to get it to them.

So we need to add our action to the controller:. I've used Images in this example, but that is just because it was easier to put together. If you are going to put together this for images, I would say watermark them and have those available as public images that your website can use to show what's on offer, and have the originals stored in the secure section for download after purchase.

Of course, this can be used for any digital assets for download, ebooks, applications, code templates, etc. When you take this to production, do look into having your web server serve your static assets rather your rails app.

There will be some extra configuration, but having the web server serve the static files means each part of your infrastructure is doing what it does best. I would also not have any state on your application server and store the files on S3 or something similar. This allows you to have more than one application server running for your app, and any of them will be able to handle any request, which will help you reduce complexity and keep things simple.

Private files for your Rails app using S3. You don't want dead code lying around your application. It's confusing when you try to come back to your app. Just remove it and bring it back with source control if you need to. If you want to make sure that the file downloads to the user's computer rather than downloads in the browser the change we want to make is a little different. This time we will be keeping the route and controller action. In this, we are displaying our thumbnail from S3, and then we are linking to the download action on our images controller.

We already have the route hooked up. We just need to change how we serve the file. This will initiate a download with their browser, and they will get their file.

There are tradeoffs in using this method of downloading though. The file will get downloaded to your server and then passed off to the user. If these are big files, then that could be a problem as they will experience a delay, and it will block an instance of your application while it is downloading. If they are small files, then this should be fine. As ever, different things work well in different situations. That depends on your app and your requirements. Personally I'd probably prefer to send the download to the user, but mainly because then users won't be moved out of the app, they will get their file and be able to go on with what they are doing, rather than being sent to an external service that they may or may not have heard of, giving a more seamless application experience.

If I were going to use the showing in the browser method, I'd do a bit more work and show it in the interface of the application, rather than just redirecting to the S3 URL, but this article is a bit more proof of concept than that. This should get you started with S3 and storing files. It is a much better solution for your application as it grows to use multiple application servers, your files won't be tied to anyone one server, giving it the flexibility to send a download to your user from any of your servers.

Given the tradeoffs mentioned though, there is certainly room for improvement here. If you have a way that you've done it that seems more flexible, especially with larger files, I'd love to discuss it, either in the comments or feel free to send me an email.

How can I protect a user's file uploads in Rails?



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