Create easier way to upload media

[moorepants]

Websites require binary media files (images, movies, etc) and it is generally a bad approach to store such files in a git repository. My method has been to upload media files to my personal dreamhost object store (dreamobject). It would be nice if there was a drag and drop way for students to add media files to the website.

We may be able to find a GUI program that can be used to upload files, for example: https://github.com/cloudlena/s3manager

[moorepants]

This is a possibly alternative that might be better than our script:

https://github.com/rclone/rclone

[moorepants]

I just tried rclone and it comes with a little GUI "rclone-browser" that seems to do the trick. Here are ubuntu instructions (you can install for other OS's from the rclone website).

sudo apt install rclone rclone-browser
rclone config

When configuring:

1. new remote
2. name: mechmotum
3. type, 5: amazon
4. subtype: 8 dreamhost option
5. give access key and secret key at command line
6. no region, press enter
7. choose only dreamhost enpoint 1
8. leave location constraint blank
9. for acl, choose 2 for "public-read" all things we push to this bucket can be seen publicly on the web

Now open the browser:

rclone-browser

Refresh the remotes. You should see:

Now select "mechmotum" and you should see:

You can add files to the mechmotum bucket there. Please leave the other buckets alone. Also, don't delete anything from the buckets. Just add.

[moorepants]

@Eimolgon can you try out rclone. If this works for you, then we can make this the recommendation for uploading website assets.

[moorepants]

@chris-konrad maybe you want to try this out also, since you are the only other person to successfully upload things to my buckets.

[Eimolgon]

Yes, it works well.
Note that "Dry run" is for testing and "Run" is for permanent action.

[moorepants]

We should make the exact instructions for the various buttons in the rclone. I noticed you could copy or overwrite, etc. Not sure what best settings are yet.

[moorepants]

I think these may be the settings we desire:

Make sure the assets/* folder contents is mirrored to the mechmotum/* bucket, only copy, and don't overwrite if the file exists and/or it is newer in the bucket.

[moorepants]

We need to figure out a way to prevent people from deleting files with the rclone.