Is this possible?

Server NGINX
1

I’m relatively new to nginx and I’m trying to figure
out whether it’s suitable for a specific use I have.
I’d like to set up the following for serving a high
volume of “badge” images in a lazy mannger. These are
images that are customized per-user, for use on social
network site profile pages. Can someone tell me if
this will be possible using nginx?

  1. Request for /badge/username.jpg comes into nginx.
    It proxies(?) to S3 using a standardized scheme.
  2. If the image is present it’s passed back via nginx.
    If not, we get a 404. nginx then proxies to a Rails
    app that generates the image on the fly, and kicks off
    a background task to upload the image to S3 so that.

If someone could tell me whether this is possible and
ideally provide some configuration pseudocode I would
be very grateful. Thanks!

Ben

2

On Fri, Oct 19, 2007 at 09:19:21PM -0700, Ben Marklein wrote:

  1. If the image is present it’s passed back via nginx.
    If not, we get a 404. nginx then proxies to a Rails
    app that generates the image on the fly, and kicks off
    a background task to upload the image to S3 so that.

If someone could tell me whether this is possible and
ideally provide some configuration pseudocode I would
be very grateful. Thanks!

S3 - is it Amazon S3 ?

location  /badge/ {
    proxy_pass   http://...S3...

    proxy_intercept_errors  on;
    error_page    404  =  @rails;
}

location  @rails {
    proxy_pass   http://rails;
}
3

I had a similar question to using nginx with Amazon’s S3. Is it possible
for
nginx to look in its local cache for an image, if its not there, grab it
from S3, and cache it before sending it to the user under my domain
instead
of S3’s?

Thanks.

----- Original Message -----
From: “Igor S.” [email protected]
To: [email protected]
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2007 4:40 AM
Subject: Re: is this possible?

4

I don’t think it’s possible to that inside nginx natively. Maybe you
could use embedded perl or have a backend proxy like
rails/mongrel/merb do it on nginx’s behalf.

5

On Sat, Oct 20, 2007 at 04:56:43AM -0400, Adam M. wrote:

I had a similar question to using nginx with Amazon’s S3. Is it possible
for nginx to look in its local cache for an image, if its not there, grab
it from S3, and cache it before sending it to the user under my domain
instead of S3’s?

Currently nginx does not really sipport caching.
However, you may implement primitive caching using mirror on demand
(proxy_store). This means that you should clean expired or unused files
by itself.

recursive_error_pages on;

location /badge/ {
root /data/www;
error_page 404 = @S3;
}

location @S3 {
proxy_pass http://…S3…

   proxy_store          on;
   proxy_store_access   user:rw  group:rw  all:r;
   proxy_temp_path      /data/temp;
   root                 /data/www;

   proxy_intercept_errors  on;
   error_page    404  =  @rails;

}

location @rails {
proxy_pass http://rails;

   proxy_store          on;
   proxy_store_access   user:rw  group:rw  all:r;
   proxy_temp_path      /data/temp;
   root                 /data/www;

}