I need to host millions of (image) files which are uploaded by the users of my site. hash_wrapper is perfect for facilitating a scalable storage system but it's only suitable for publicly accessible files. I also need privately accessible files.

It seems to be fairly trivial to extend hash_wrapper with a privatehash:// schema to accomplish this. Besides that I want to implement a system like:

http://code.google.com/p/mod-auth-token/ (Apache)
https://github.com/footplus/libvmod-secdown (Varnish)

to enable secure download links without the need to hit Drupal to download the files.

(extensions like these are also available for Lighttpd and Nginx. It's also trivial to handle these URLs with mod_rewrite and a PHP script instead of bootstrapping Drupal for every private image download).

Does this fit in the scope of hash_wrapper? Or should I fork hash_wrapper and create privatehash_wrapper?

Comments

jhedstrom’s picture

jhedstrom
Primary language English
Location Portland, OR
commented

FWIW, I'd like to see support for private file system within this module rather than a fork. I may have some time soon to roll a patch so it provides public and private stream wrappers.