Hacker News Reader

If you run nginx anyway, why not serve static files from nginx? No need for temporary files, no extra disk space.

The authorization can probably be done somehow in nginx as well.

Even if your authorization is so sophisticated that nginx cannot do it, a common pattern I’ve seen is to support a special HTTP response header for the reverse proxy to read directly from disk after your custom authorization code completes. This trick dates back to at least 2010. The nginx version of this seemed to be called X-Accel-Redirect from a quick search.

Yeah it's a bit odd to use a Haskell server to serve a static file which nginx then needs to buffer. You'd do much much better just serving the file out of nginx. You could authenticate requests using the very simple auth_request module:

https://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_auth_request_module....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com