Rainbows::Sendfile

This middleware handles X-Sendfile headers generated by applications or middlewares down the stack. It should be placed at the top (outermost layer) of the middleware stack to avoid having its to_path method clobbered by another middleware.

This converts X-Sendfile responses to bodies which respond to the to_path method which allows certain concurrency models to serve efficiently using sendfile() or similar. With multithreaded models under Ruby 1.9, IO.copy_stream will be used.

This middleware is the opposite of Rack::Sendfile as it reverses the effect of Rack:::Sendfile. Unlike many Ruby web servers, some configurations of Rainbows! are capable of serving static files efficiently.

Compatibility (via IO.copy_stream in Ruby 1.9):

• ThreadSpawn

• ThreadPool

• WriterThreadPool

• WriterThreadSpawn

Compatibility (Ruby 1.8 and 1.9)

• EventMachine

• NeverBlock (using EventMachine)

DO NOT use this middleware if you’re proxying to Rainbows! with a server that understands X-Sendfile (e.g. Apache, Lighttpd) natively.

This does NOT understand X-Accel-Redirect headers intended for nginx. X-Accel-Redirect requires the application to be highly coupled with the corresponding nginx configuration, and is thus too complicated to be worth supporting.

Example config.ru:

use Rainbows::Sendfile
run lambda { |env|
  path = "#{Dir.pwd}/random_blob"
  [ 200,
    {
      'X-Sendfile' => path,
      'Content-Type' => 'application/octet-stream'
    },
    []
  ]
}