better-send-file
================

Deprecation Notice
==================

This plugin is no longer in use in Kete (http://github.com/kete/kete) and therefore will no longer be maintained by Katipo Communications LTD.

Summary
=======

better_send_file is a plugin by James Stradling <http://www.katipo.co.nz> which overrides Rail's ActionController::Streaming#send_file method to use a reverse proxy to send files.

This is especially useful when running Mongrels as web-servers as send_file can tie up a mongrel instance for a long period of time in some circumstances.

better-send-file functionality
==============================

better_send_file currently supports the following reverse proxies:
	Nginx (X-Accel-Redirect)
	
usage
=====

1.	Configure Nginx to handle the X-Accel-Redirect header, then restart your Nginx server.

	a) Add the following declaration in the server block on the nginx.conf file
	
	location /private/ {
		root /home/user/apps/my_app/;
		internal;
	}
	
	b) Substitute /private for the path inside your application to the files to be served. This is file system relative, not URL relative. For instance, in the example above, /private references the folder at /home/user/apps/my_app/private.
	c) Substitute /home/user/apps/my_app/ for the full path to your applications's root directory.

	NB: The internal declaration is mandatory, but has the side effect that files inside this folder cannot be fetched from outside of your application directly (i.e. through a GET request to the appropriate URL). The file must be actively served from inside the application by sending the X-Accel-Redirect header to the Nginx server.
	
	
2.	Add the better_send_file plugin to your application's vendor/plugins/ directory.
3.	Restart your web-server (e.g. mongrel) instances, and you're good to go. better_send_file override's rails' send_file method so you can keep using this as normal.

See the Rails docs at http://api.rubyonrails.org for more info.