vip is an image proxy designed for easily resizing and caching images.
Images are served up with a URI that contains a bucket name, as well as a unique identifier for the image:
images.example.com/mybucket/5272a0e7d0d9813e21
When images are requested they are placed into an in-memory cache to make repeated requests for that image faster.
You can resize an image on the fly by providing an ?s=X parameter that specifies
a maximum width for the image. The maximum width that can be provided is 720 pixels.
For example, if you want to resize an image down to a 160 pixel thumbnail:
images.example.com/mybucket/5272a0e7d0d9813e21?s=160
Resized images may also be center-cropped by passing ?c=true in the querystring:
images.example.com/mybucket/5272a0e7d0d9813e21?s=160&c=true
The thumbnail will then be cached to both groupcache and S3. If the image leaves
the in-memory cache it will not need to be resized again.
Images are uploaded through vip to generate the serving URL. Upload requests should
have the image encoded as the body. Content-Type and authentication headers will also
need to be provided. The route for uploads is:
images.example.com/upload/mybucket
This will upload the supplied image into mybucket and return a JSON-encoded serving URL:
{
"url": "http://images.example.com/mybucket/5272a0e7d0d9813e21"
}
vip can be deployed with Docker:
$ docker run -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=... \
-e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=... vokalinteractive/vip
It is recommended that you deploy vip behind SSL and with an authentication token. This
token can be generated by your own application, but should be used by clients when uploading.
Authentication is only checked during uploads. The expected format for authentication is in the
X-Vip-Token header:
X-Vip-Token: c5411c3aac6f2c6d55a1fdc2d0a98c49
To set the token for your deployment, pass it as the environment variable AUTH_TOKEN when deploying:
$ docker run -e AUTH_TOKEN=... -e AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=... \
-e AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=... vokalinteractive/vip
vip can (and should be) used behind a CDN like Amazon Cloudfront. To use vip behind the
Cloudfront CDN setup a custom origin with the FQDN of your proxy, and also permit POST HTTP
methods on the distribution.
