Private Files

Despite the tradeoffs in performance, and the inability to aggregate Javascript and CSS, I still like the idea of private files. The advantage of using the Drupal permissions system (and the CMS to manage files) outweight the slight, in my case, degradation in speed.

• • http://drupal.org/node/572516 to patch Drupal 6 to allow CSS aggregation & private files together

That said, I have nginx running on a flat file-serving VPS, and would like to have some static content served from that server instead of the separate, Drupal server. These are my notes on how to do that.

• • do I need a reverse proxy setup? The files are currently served from the justagwailo.com domain.

  • if not, can I use a subdomain? static.justagwailo.com currently points to an Amazon S3 bucket hosting some video. I like the idea of using S3 to host static content, but would also like to know how to run my own file server.

    • if I were to use a subdomain, how would you use Drupal's upload system to keep store then keep track of it?

    • file permissions would need to be granted to something (Drupal itself? SFTP?) and the fully qualified URL either stored in the database or generated on the fly (or cached)