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Serve private images

You can serve private images by using signed URL tokens. When an image requires a signed URL, the image cannot be accessed without a token unless it is being requested for a variant set to always allow public access.

  1. Log in to the Cloudflare dashboard and select your account.
  2. Select Images > Keys.
  3. Copy your key and use it to generate an expiring tokenized URL.

The example below uses a Worker that takes in a regular URL without a signed token and returns a tokenized URL that expires after one day. You can, however, set this expiration period to whatever you need, by changing the const EXPIRATION value.

const KEY = "YOUR_KEY_FROM_IMAGES_DASHBOARD";
const EXPIRATION = 60 * 60 * 24; // 1 day
const bufferToHex = (buffer) =>
[...new Uint8Array(buffer)]
.map((x) => x.toString(16).padStart(2, "0"))
.join("");
async function generateSignedUrl(url) {
// `url` is a full imagedelivery.net URL
// e.g. https://imagedelivery.net/cheeW4oKsx5ljh8e8BoL2A/bc27a117-9509-446b-8c69-c81bfeac0a01/mobile
const encoder = new TextEncoder();
const secretKeyData = encoder.encode(KEY);
const key = await crypto.subtle.importKey(
"raw",
secretKeyData,
{ name: "HMAC", hash: "SHA-256" },
false,
["sign"],
);
// Attach the expiration value to the `url`
const expiry = Math.floor(Date.now() / 1000) + EXPIRATION;
url.searchParams.set("exp", expiry);
// `url` now looks like
// https://imagedelivery.net/cheeW4oKsx5ljh8e8BoL2A/bc27a117-9509-446b-8c69-c81bfeac0a01/mobile?exp=1631289275
const stringToSign = url.pathname + "?" + url.searchParams.toString();
// for example, /cheeW4oKsx5ljh8e8BoL2A/bc27a117-9509-446b-8c69-c81bfeac0a01/mobile?exp=1631289275
// Generate the signature
const mac = await crypto.subtle.sign(
"HMAC",
key,
encoder.encode(stringToSign),
);
const sig = bufferToHex(new Uint8Array(mac).buffer);
// And attach it to the `url`
url.searchParams.set("sig", sig);
return new Response(url);
}
export default {
async fetch(request, env, ctx) {
const url = new URL(event.request.url);
const imageDeliveryURL = new URL(
url.pathname
.slice(1)
.replace("https:/imagedelivery.net", "https://imagedelivery.net"),
);
return generateSignedUrl(imageDeliveryURL);
},
};