Best practice for serving static files

Question

I am developing on a python webserver (Tornado). I plan to place this in a production instance with nginx in front. This will be my first time placing something into a production environment on my own. My question is how to setup files/directories for static serving. For instance my application, allows users to upload photos to the web. I recieve the requests in Tornado, and save to disk. However when a user visits their items page, I would rather the images be pulled from a static server. My question is what is the best practice for getting the images from my dynamic server to the static server? Do I rsync the image directory to the static server, then run a cron that delete the images from the dynamic server?

Answer 1

Best practice is use shared storage, but if can't use it, than you can use "proxy_store" option from nginx. Example from nginx doc:

location /images/ {
    root                 /data/www;
    error_page           404 = @fetch;
}

location @fetch {
    internal;

    proxy_pass           http://backend;
    proxy_store          on;
    proxy_store_access   user:rw  group:rw  all:r;
    proxy_temp_path      /data/temp;

    root                 /data/www;
}