Feb 19, 2016
In this post I'll describe how I configured Nginx to efficiently and securely serve thumbnails for images hosted on S3. As a bonus, I'll also show how I'm using the Secure Links module to prevent people from maliciously generating thumbnails.
Getting started
In order for all the pieces to work, your Nginx needs to be compiled with the image filter, proxy, and secure links modules. You can check what modules you have by running nginx -V. If you're using Ubuntu, an easy fix is to just install the nginx-extras package.
Once Nginx is ready, we can start in on configuring Nginx.