Rack::Thumb::Proxy

Resize remotely hosted images not hosted on your servers dynamically. Safely proxy request

Rack::Thumb::Proxy is a project in the spirit of Rack::Thumb, but for use in situations when one doesn't host the images statically on one's own server, consider such an example:

<img src="http://a-site-which-doesnt-run-ssl.com/the/product/image.png" />

One could download, resize, host and be responsible for this image, but in the days of realtime systems, massive data, clustered storage, etcetera, why bother? One could hot-link the image, but then this doesn't work for cross-protocol, with https in the mix.

<img src="/media/thumbs/http%3A%2F%2Fa-site-which-doesnt-run-ssl.com%2Fthe%2Fproduct%2Fimage.png" />

Where, in this case one has predefined thumbs as a category. One could also do something such as:

<img src="/media/50x50/http%3A%2F%2Fa-site-which-doesnt-run-ssl.com%2Fthe%2Fproduct%2Fimage.png" />

or even

<img src="/media/50x50/http%3A%2F%2Fa-site-which-doesnt-run-ssl.com%2Fthe%2Fproduct%2Fimage.png" />

When combined with a CDN or Rack::Cache, this shouldn't cause too heavy a performance penalty, and images from upstream will even be cached locally.

Safety

To ensure that someone doesn't decide to use your server resources to resize their entire collection of cat pictures, there's a hash mechanism which is also available. This works very much like Rack::Thumb.

To use this feature, simply configure Rack::Thumb::Proxy with a secret, and a key_length (the latter may be ommitted and defaults to 10), urls will be then generated with the following appearance:

<img src="/media/15a5683b74/50x50/http%3A%2F%2Fa-site-which-doesnt-run-ssl.com%2Fthe%2Fproduct%2Fimage.png" />

The key is calculated as a result of the following pattern:

"%s\t%s\t%s" % <secret>, <options>, <url encoded image source>

For example with a terrible secret of secret:

echo "secret\t50x50\thttp%3A%2F%2Fa-site-which-doesnt-run-ssl.com%2Fthe%2Fproduct%2Fimage.png" | openssl dgst -sha1

The resulting SHA is as you see above. it is recommended that you choose a secret using a token generation tool, if you are using Rails, you have one baked-in simply use rake secret from your Rails project root.

Requests which do not match the expected format will receive a 400 Bad Request response.

(Rails) Helpers

A helper module is provided which can be used in Rails, Sinatra, or your unit tests. This is loaded automatically via a Railtie into Rails, available from all views. The following methods are defined:

proxied_image_url("image url", options)
proxied_image_tag("image url", options)

Somewhat of a private API are the following, which you may find useful:

signature_hash_for("image url", options)

The image url passed here should not be URL encoded, as Rack::Thumb::Proxy will encode it correctly for you.

`options`

"50x"                  `[String]`Constrain to 50 pixels height, maintaining
                       original aspect ratio

"x100"                 `[String]`Constrain to 100 pixels width, maintaining
                       original aspect ratio

"50x75n"               `[String]` Constrain to 50 pixels height, distorting the
                       image to acheive a 75 pixels width with *northern* gravity
                       (see below)

"50x75"                `[String]` Crop to 50 pixels height, without distorting the
                       image to acheive a 75 pixels width

:label                 `[Symbol]` Take the options specified in 
                       the label (see below)

{width: 123, height: } `[Hash]` The keys `width`, `height`, and
                       `gravity` are accepted

Option Labels

One can use the configuration API as such to name a label:

Rack::Thumb::Proxy.configure do
  option_label :product_thumbnail, "100x100"
end

Gravity

Gravity can be specified which will pull the crop (in the case that both width, and height are given), it will focus the cropped area of the image, valid options are n, ne, e, se, s, sw, w, nw. The default gracity is c, which will focus the crop on the centre of the image.

No Magic

If you don't need to resize the image, specifying a magical option of noop disables any kind of resizing, this is useful if you just need to use the software a as a proxy. When operating in this mode there is no dependency on imagemagick.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'rack-thumb-proxy'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install rack-thumb-proxy

Usage

The included railtie will ensure that this is available in your Rails application, you can simply use something like:

match '/media', :to => Rack::Thumb::Proxy

If you need to configure additional options, this can be done in an initializer, or by passing a configuaation hash to the Rack::Thumb::Proxy initialzer. The former is preferred.

Example Configuration

Rack::Thumb::Proxy.configure do
  prefix     "/media/"
  secret     "d94bba3d2e0b4809a570158506"
  key_length 10
end

When one doesn't want to use the configuration API, the more succinct version would be to do something like:

# ./config/routes.rb
match '/media' => Rack::Thumb::Proxy { prefix: "/",
                        secret: "ABC1234", key_length: 10 }

# config.ru
use Rack::Thumb::Proxy { prefix: "/", secret: "ABC1234", key_length: 10 }

One complication is that when using the link generator functions, one must use the configuration API, otherwise the default path will be /.

To Do

Implement Railtie/helpers.
Ensure the hash signatures are checked.
Make it possible to control the cache control header.
Don't use open-uri.
Check earlier in the process that upstream is an image, don't rely on MiniMagick to blow up on non-image content.
Take the cache-control headers from upstream if we can.
Allow a local cache for the images, perhaps somewhere in /tmp.
Actually support option labels, it just looks good in the readme right now, alas.

Contributing

Fork it
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request