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UPDATE: As of May 1, 2021 Bintray services will no longer be available (ConanCenter and JCenter are not affected) for more information read the Centers Deprecation Blog

Bintray Premium gives you cool new features such as private repositories, permission management, more storage and so much more. One of the biggest benefits of using a Premium account is the ability to create expirable, signed URLs for your repositories’ content.

Signed URLs you said? What’s that?

A signed URL is an obscure URL with a (potentially) limited lifetime. When your artifacts are published in a private repository, each artifact is hidden from unauthorized Bintray users. If you want to allow any Bintray user, or even or a non-Bintray user to download your package, you can generate a one-time unique URL with an option to limit its validity so that is expires after a certain amount of time. You can also revoke any outstanding URLs at any time.

How does it work?

When you become a premium user in Bintray, your account holds unique, internal, private and public keys. The URL you decide to sign, will be encrypted and decrypted with those keys.

Let’s say user “srubin” has a private repository called “artifactory”.

This private repo contains a file, “artifactory.rar”, that protected from public access. Only authorized users can download it using the standard download link, which is:
https://dl.bintray.com/srubin/artifactory/com/jfrog/artifactorypro/artifactory.rar

To allow a one-off download of this file we will generate a signed URL for it using a simple REST call:

curl -XPOST -usrubin:APIKEY "https://api.bintray.com/signed_url/srubin/artifactory/com/jfrog/artifactorypro/artifactory.rar"

Response:

{
"url":"https://dl.bintray.com/srubin/artifactory/com/jfrog/artiafctorypro/artifactory.rar?expiry=1415101346415&signature=BfRaL2HDbCDsPyPThAnlI%2B0TG26NcH4i0ugyKZ%2FjevLiNfEdHXyUh0Q1NNGc1Pz7V1nZkeh9RAafrUyUE%2FMOFQ%3D%3D"
}

By default, this URL will be valid for 24 hours, but we can change that by specifying an expiry time in a simple JSON configuration document:

curl -XPOST -usrubin:APIKEY  -H "Content-Type: application/json"  -d "{\"expiry\":7956915742000}" https://api.bintray.com/signed_url/srubin/artifactory/com/jfrog/artiactorypro/artifactory.rar"

Response:

{
"url":"https://dl.bintray.com/srubin/artifactory/com/jfrog/artiactorypro/artifactory.rar?expiry=7956915742000&signature=g5OC3RXkFhnnFYfsgqFXw9J%2FfmwCzeIsd%2FHCRgm5VjCAhrzij1GPuAv0JwZPhGD0mEqs1y2WcQ77LMrDzp9%3D%3D"
}

More details about this API can be found in our documentation.

Summary

Signed, expirable URLs is a cool new feature of Bintray. It allows you to automate the generation of one-off download URLs and distribute them to any end user.

We will soon extend this feature to make it even cooler. Keep following to see what we have in store for you!