Direct Serving Of Media Files

To speed up the serving of media files to the client, it is recommended to configure the server to serve images directly from the local file system, without accessing the node. As a prerequisite, you need to configure a web server (like NGINX) as a reverse proxy for moera-node.

Configure the node

To activate direct serving, turn node.media.direct-serve option on in the Moera node configuration file:

node:
  media:
    direct-serve: true

After that, restart moera-node. The node will detect the option and will create public/ and private/ subdirectories in your media directory (see node.media.path option). These subdirectories will be populated with symlinks to public and private media files respectively. The private media files get a random name that periodically changes to prevent unauthorized access.

The process of creating symlinks will take some time, but you do not need to wait till it finishes. The media files that do not have a symlink yet will be served normally through the node.

Configure NGINX

To serve the files from the filesystem, add the following snippets to your NGINX configuration:

server {
    location /moera/media/public/ {
        if ($request_method = OPTIONS) {
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "authorization, content-type, x-accept-moera";
            add_header Access-Control-Expose-Headers "x-moera";
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET";
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*";
            add_header Access-Control-Max-Age 86400;
            add_header Allow "GET, HEAD, OPTIONS";
            add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains;" always;
            return 200;
        }
        rewrite /([\w-]+)=\.(\w+)$ /$1.$2 permanent;
        alias /srv/moera.blog/media/public/;
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*";
        expires max;
    }

    location ~ ^/moera/media/private/([^/]+_[^/]+)$ {
        if ($request_method = OPTIONS) {
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Headers "authorization, content-type, x-accept-moera";
            add_header Access-Control-Expose-Headers "x-moera";
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Methods "GET";
            add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*";
            add_header Access-Control-Max-Age 86400;
            add_header Allow "GET, HEAD, OPTIONS";
            add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=63072000; includeSubdomains;" always;
            return 200;
        }
        alias /srv/moera.blog/media/private/$1;
        add_header Access-Control-Allow-Origin "*";
        if ($arg_download) {
                add_header Content-Disposition "attachment";
        }
        expires max;
    }
}

This configuration uses /srv/blog.moera.org/media as a media directory for moera-node. Change this to your media directory.