An Oauth2 use case - Authenticating and posting articles with images via LinkedIn API (v. 202504)

An Oauth2 use case - Authenticating and posting articles with images via LinkedIn API (v. 202504)

In this article we will do a review of all the steps needed for authenticating on Linkedin via its API, which rely on Oauth2 protocol. After authentication, we’ll use the API to post content with images. We’ll assume that the reader already has an active account on LinkedIn.
We’ll go in details will all the requests and responses needed for succeeding, and in each step we’ll provide a sequence diagram to better follow the process.
We’ll also refer to the last version of the LinkedIn API, which il 2025-04.
The content will be as follow:

  • Prerequisites before starting
  • Oauth2 in Action
  • Get the profile URN
  • Finally posting content
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Cloudformation templates for Cloudfront automatic cache invalidation using Lambda within CodePipeline

Cloudformation templates for Cloudfront automatic cache invalidation using Lambda within CodePipeline

In this post I’m going to show how I triggered an automatic cache invalidation for the Cloudfront distribution that is serving this website. As in the previous posts, all the resources will be provisioned via CloudFormation.
At the end of the post the CLI commands to create and / or update the resources will be shown.

The manual procedure

Once that the markdown file for a post is written and a local compilation / rendering has been made, the markdown source can be pushed on the git repo. That triggers the AWS Codepipeline that will download the source, render the markdown into html, and push the result to the S3 bucket served by Cloudfront.
Since Cloudfront is serving the S3 bucket, caching is in place. Newly pushed content won’t be visible until the cache expires, which is not feasible. So, after a successful compilation and pushing to S3, I manually get to Cloudfront distribution invalidations and fire a new invalidation. This way I’m sure that subsequent requests to the website will get the newly updated content.
In the images below the steps for manual invalidation are shown:

Go to CloudFront / Distributions, and search for “Invalidations” tab

Cloudfront invalidation manual step 1

Then selecting the last successful invalidation (shown below on the very left) and “copy to new” (upper right)

Cloudfront invalidation manual step 2

And then confirming the copy of the invalidation with the last path (the path /* is fine since AWS charges per invalidation, regardless of how much deep it is)

Cloudfront invalidation manual step 3

The invalidation takes a few minutes to be completed, and then the website is good to go. This is a mundane and forgetful-prone task, so I’m better automating it.

Automation setup

There is not an “invalidate cache” action that can be directly call from CodePipeline. A Lambda that actually creates the invalidation is needed and must be called as an action in the CodePipeline structure.
Let’s see in details the two resources:

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