I need to serve files through grails, only users with permission have access, so I cant serve them with a static link to a container. The system is able to stream binary files to the client without problems,but now (for bandwidth performance issues on the client) I need to implement segmented or partial downloads in the controllers.
Theres a plugin or proven solution to this problem?
May be some kind of tomcat/apache plugin to restrict access to files with certain rules or temporal tickets so I can delegate the "resume download" or "segmented download" problem to the container.
Also i need to log and save stats on the downloads of the users.
I need good performance so, I think doing this in the controller is not good idea.
Sorry bad english.
There is a plugin for apache - https://tn123.org/mod_xsendfile/ It doesn't matter what you're using behind apache at this case. By using this plugin you will respond with special header X-SENDFILE, with path to file to serve, and Apache will take care about actual file downloading for current request.
If you're using Nginx, you have to use X-Accel-Redirect header, see http://wiki.nginx.org/XSendfile
Related
I have found extensive documentation on how to serve static content with NGINX but I haven't found a good source of information with best practices to have the content (files in the file system) added.
Is POSTing acceptable? or NGNIX by design delegates the actual population of content to another process?
Nginx is best as a proxy server. You could add functionality to do much more in nginx, including posting files, with openresty.
Generally, send the post request to another process to handle it, such as nodejs.
If I misunderstood, and you just want to get your local files into the server directories that nginx is using, check out rsync
I'm a novice web developer with some background in programming (mostly Python).
I'm looking for some basic advice on choosing the right technology.
I need to serve files over the internet (mp3's), but I need to implement some
control on the access:
1. Files will be accessible only for authorized users.
2. I need to keep track on how many times a file was loaded, by whom, etc.
What might be the best technology to implement this? That is, should I
learn Apache, or maybe Django? or maybe something else?
I'm looking for a 'pointer' in the right direction.
Thank!
R
If you need to track/control the downloads that suggests that the MP3 urls need to be routed through a Rails controller. Very doable. At that point you can run your checks, track your stats, and send the file back.
If it's a lot of MP3's, you would like to not have Rails do the actual sending of the MP3 data as it's a waste of it's time and ties up an instance. Look into xsendfile where Rails can send a response header indicating the file path to send and apache will intercept it and do the actual sending.
https://tn123.org/mod_xsendfile/
http://rack.rubyforge.org/doc/classes/Rack/Sendfile.html
You could use Django and Lighttpd as a web server. With Lighttpd you can use mod_secdownload, wich enables you to generate one time only urls.
More info can be found here: http://redmine.lighttpd.net/projects/1/wiki/Docs_ModSecDownload
You can check for permissions in your Django (or any other) app and then redirect the user to this disposable URL if he passed the permission check.
I would like to make a Rails app to create a pretty download page for any file requested either through a link or by typing the url of the file. Is there a way to intercept the request for a file in Apache or elsewhere and send it to the app so it can generate the page?
I'd also prefer not to change the url when redirecting to the app, but it doesn't really matter either way.
So to wrap up, turn this: http://files.spherecat1.com/stuff.txt, into this:
http://files.spherecat1.com/download-page-mockup.png
(Image for illustrative purposes only and may not accurately depict final product. It's fun to add disclaimers to everything.)
Do you mean an entire Rails app just for that? Seems like overkill - you can use Sinatra, a single route, and their send_file function with much greater ease. It also deploys on Apache with Passenger.
If you have control over this thing, and you only plan to offer downloads in this way and not in any other, you should probably store the files in some non-public directory and instead allow your Rails/Sinatra app to access and push the files to the user. (Again, with send_file, that's easy.) Why put a file in your web root if your users will never access it that way?
I'm trying to log download statistics for .pdfs and .zips (5-25MB) in a rails app that I'm currently developing and I just hit a brick wall; I found out our shared hosting provider doesn't support mod_xsendfile. The sources I've read state that without this, multiple downloads could potentially cause a DoS issue—something I'm definitely trying to avoid. I'm wondering if there are any alternatives to this method of serving files through rails?
Well, how sensitive are the files you're storing?
If you hosted these files somewhere under your app's /public directory, you could just do a meta tag or javascript redirect to the public-facing URL of these files after your users hit some sort of controller action that will update your download statistics.
In this case, your users would probably need to get one of those "Your download should commence in a few moments" pages before the browser would start the file download.
Under this scenario, your Rails application won't be streaming the file out, your web server will, which will give you the same effect as xsendfile. On the other hand, this won't work very well if you need to control access to those downloadable files.
I'm still new to the whole CDN ideaology, so this might be a stupid question but I'm sure someone can shed some light on this. I've got a basic php script that takes user image uploads, resizes them, creates a directory ($user_id), and stores the finished product in the directory (like www.mysite.com/uploads/$user_id/image1.jpg). Works like a charm.
I just got all the hosting stuff squared away and I'm using the Rackspace (Slicehost?) "Cloud Server" architecture. I also signed up for the Rackspace (Mosso?) "Cloud Files". So far so good.
So my question is: Should I be storing the images that users upload locally (on my apache server) or as objects via Cloud Files? It seems like a great idea to separate the static content from my web server so I can just use it to generate the dynamic content. But would it be a lot of overhead to create a CDN-enabled Container each time a user uploads an image?
Hopefully I'm not missing the boat on this one totally. I can't seem to find a whole lot of info about this, but I'm sure there is a good reason why I should either pursue or avoid this idea. Any suggestions are greatly appreciated!
I am not familiar with Rackspace's offering, but the general logic behind using a CDN for static content is to achieve two goals:
offload the bandwidth and processing
to other servers, freeing up yours.
move the requests off to the client
Move the large static content closer
to the client
When you send the generated HTML to the browser, it will "see" the images as www.yourdomain.com/my_image.jpg for example, and perform additional requests for each piece of static content, potentially starving your server of threads to service requests. If you move all this content onto a CDN, the browser would see something like cdn.yourdomain.com, and the browser will request the images from the CDN, thus allowing your server to service other requests instead. Additionally, most CDN's distribute your content to multiple locations and have geographic routing for requests to serve the content from the closest possible location, improving the perceived load time for clients.