imageproxy is a caching image proxy server written in go. It features:
- basic image adjustments like resizing, cropping, and rotation
- access control using host whitelists or request signing (HMAC-SHA256)
- support for jpeg, png, webp (decode only), tiff, and gif image formats (including animated gifs)
- on-disk caching, respecting the cache headers of the original images
- easy deployment, since it's pure go
Personally, I use it primarily to dynamically resize images hosted on my own site (read more in this post). But you can also enable request signing and use it as an SSL proxy for remote images, similar to atmos/camo but with additional image adjustment options.
imageproxy URLs are of the form http://localhost/{options}/{remote_url}.
Options are available for cropping, resizing, rotation, flipping, and digital signatures among a few others. Options for are specified as a comma delimited list of parameters, which can be supplied in any order. Duplicate parameters overwrite previous values.
See the full list of available options at https://godoc.org/willnorris.com/go/imageproxy#ParseOptions.
The URL of the original image to load is specified as the remainder of the
path, without any encoding. For example,
http://localhost/200/https://willnorris.com/logo.jpg.
In order to optimize caching, it is recommended that URLs not contain query strings.
The following live examples demonstrate setting different options on this source image, which measures 1024 by 678 pixels.
| Options | Meaning | Image |
|---|---|---|
| 200x | 200px wide, proportional height |  |
| x0.15 | 15% original height, proportional width |  |
| 100x150 | 100 by 150 pixels, cropping as needed |  |
| 100 | 100px square, cropping as needed |  |
| 150,fit | scale to fit 150px square, no cropping |  |
| 100,r90 | 100px square, rotated 90 degrees |  |
| 100,fv,fh | 100px square, flipped horizontal and vertical |  |
| 200x,q60 | 200px wide, proportional height, 60% quality |  |
| 200x,png | 200px wide, converted to PNG format |  |
| cx175,cw400,ch300,100x | crop to 400x300px starting at (175,0), scale to 100px wide |  |
Transformation also works on animated gifs. Here is this source image resized to 200px square and rotated 270 degrees:
Install the package using:
go get willnorris.com/go/imageproxy/cmd/imageproxy
(Note that go1.2 and earlier may have trouble fetching the package with go get).
Once installed, ensure $GOPATH/bin is in your $PATH, then run the proxy
using:
imageproxy
This will start the proxy on port 8080, without any caching and with no host whitelist (meaning any remote URL can be proxied). Test this by navigating to http://localhost:8080/500/https://octodex.github.com/images/codercat.jpg and you should see a 500px square coder octocat.
By default, the imageproxy command does not cache responses, but caching can be
enabled using the -cache flag. It supports the following values:
memory- uses an in-memory LRU cache. By default, this is limited to 100mb. To customize the size of the cache or the max age for cached items, use the formatmemory:size:agewhere size is measured in mb and age is a duration. For example,memory:200:4hwill create a 200mb cache that will cache items no longer than 4 hours.- directory on local disk (e.g.
/tmp/imageproxy) - will cache images on disk - s3 URL (e.g.
s3://region/bucket-name/optional-path-prefix) - will cache images on Amazon S3. This requires either an IAM role and instance profile with access to your your bucket orAWS_ACCESS_KEY_IDandAWS_SECRET_KEYenvironmental variables be set. (Additional methods of loading credentials are documented in the aws-sdk-go session package). - gcs URL (e.g.
gcs://bucket-name/optional-path-prefix) - will cache images on Google Cloud Storage. This requiresGCP_PRIVATE_KEYenvironmental variable be set. - azure URL (e.g.
azure://container-name/) - will cache images on Azure Storage. This requiresAZURESTORAGE_ACCOUNT_NAMEand - redis URL (e.g.
redis://hostname/) - will cache images on the specified redis host. The full URL syntax is defined by the redis URI registration. Rather than specify password in the URI, use theREDIS_PASSWORDenvironment variable.
For example, to cache files on disk in the /tmp/imageproxy directory:
imageproxy -cache /tmp/imageproxy
Reload the codercat URL, and then inspect the contents of
/tmp/imageproxy. Within the subdirectories, there should be two files, one
for the original full-size codercat image, and one for the resized 500px
version.
If the -cache flag is specified multiple times, multiple caches will be
created in a tiered fashion. Typically this is used to put a smaller and
faster in-memory cache in front of a larger but slower on-disk cache. For
example, the following will first check an in-memory cache for an image,
followed by a gcs bucket:
imageproxy -cache memory -cache gcs://my-bucket/
You can limit images to only be accessible for certain hosts in the HTTP referrer header, which can help prevent others from hotlinking to images. It can be enabled by running:
imageproxy -referrers example.com
Reload the codercat URL, and you should now get an error message. You can
specify multiple hosts as a comma separated list, or prefix a host value with
*. to allow all sub-domains as well.
You can limit the remote hosts that the proxy will fetch images from using the
whitelist flag. This is useful, for example, for locking the proxy down to
your own hosts to prevent others from abusing it. Of course if you want to
support fetching from any host, leave off the whitelist flag. Try it out by
running:
imageproxy -whitelist example.com
Reload the codercat URL, and you should now get an error message. You can
specify multiple hosts as a comma separated list, or prefix a host value with
*. to allow all sub-domains as well.
Instead of a host whitelist, you can require that requests be signed. This is useful in preventing abuse when you don't have just a static list of hosts you want to allow. Signatures are generated using HMAC-SHA256 against the remote URL, and url-safe base64 encoding the result:
base64urlencode(hmac.New(sha256, <key>).digest(<remote_url>))
The HMAC key is specified using the signatureKey flag. If this flag
begins with an "@", the remainder of the value is interpreted as a file on disk
which contains the HMAC key.
Try it out by running:
imageproxy -signatureKey "secret key"
Reload the codercat URL, and you should see an error message. Now load a signed codercat URL and verify that it loads properly.
Some simple code samples for generating signatures in various languages can be found in URL Signing.
If both a whiltelist and signatureKey are specified, requests can match either. In other words, requests that match one of the whitelisted hosts don't necessarily need to be signed, though they can be.
Typically, remote images to be proxied are specified as absolute URLs. However, if you commonly proxy images from a single source, you can provide a base URL and then specify remote images relative to that base. Try it out by running:
imageproxy -baseURL https://octodex.github.com/
Then load the codercat image, specified as a URL relative to that base: http://localhost:8080/500/images/codercat.jpg. Note that this is not an effective method to mask the true source of the images being proxied; it is trivial to discover the base URL being used. Even when a base URL is specified, you can always provide the absolute URL of the image to be proxied.
By default, the imageproxy won't scale images beyond their original size.
However, you can use the scaleUp command-line flag to allow this to happen:
imageproxy -scaleUp true
Imageproxy can proxy remote webp images, but they will be served in either jpeg or png format (this is because the golang webp library only supports webp decoding) if any transformation is requested. If no format is specified, imageproxy will use jpeg by default. If no transformation is requested (for example, if you are just using imageproxy as an SSL proxy) then the original webp image will be served as-is without any format conversion.
Because so few browsers support tiff images, they will be converted to jpeg by default if any transformation is requested. To force encoding as tiff, pass the "tiff" option. Like webp, tiff images will be served as-is without any format conversion if no transformation is requested.
Run imageproxy -help for a complete list of flags the command accepts. If
you want to use a different caching implementation, it's probably easiest to
just make a copy of cmd/imageproxy/main.go and customize it to fit your
needs... it's a very simple command.
In most cases, you can follow the normal procedure for building a deploying any go application. For example, I build it directly on my production debian server using:
go build willnorris.com/go/imageproxy/cmd/imageproxy- copy resulting binary to
/usr/local/bin - copy
etc/imageproxy.serviceto/lib/systemd/systemand enable usingsystemctl.
Instructions have been contributed below for running on other platforms, but I don't have much experience with them personally.
It's easy to vendorize the dependencies with Godep and deploy to Heroku. Take
a look at this GitHub repo
A docker image is available at willnorris/imageproxy.
You can run it by
docker run -p 8080:8080 willnorris/imageproxy -addr 0.0.0.0:8080
Or in your Dockerfile:
ENTRYPOINT ["/go/bin/imageproxy", "-addr 0.0.0.0:8080"]
You can use follow config to prevent URL overwritting:
location ~ ^/api/imageproxy/ {
# pattern match to capture the original URL to prevent URL
# canonicalization, which would strip double slashes
if ($request_uri ~ "/api/imageproxy/(.+)") {
set $path $1;
rewrite .* /$path break;
}
proxy_pass http://localhost:8080;
}
imageproxy is copyright Google, but is not an official Google product. It is available under the Apache 2.0 License.