PHP asset proxy increases website availability

Don’t you hate it when your site does not work, because you linked jQuery from “code.jquery.com” and that site is suffering connection problems? This may also happen with stylesheets or with font files. To counter this problem (but not lose the convenience of remote loaded assets) I created  an “asset proxy” in PHP. It will cache the assets in a cache folder on your web server, so that you do not have to worry about downtime of other services. You can configure how often the cache should be refreshed. When the external source is not available during a refresh the stale cache files will be used and there is no downtime at all!

Install asset-proxy.php in your webroot. Then replace all references in your HTML from:

 href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans:400,700"

to:

 href="/asset-proxy.php/fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Droid+Sans:400,700"

Make sure you edit the list of allowed hostnames in the header of the PHP file and that you set an appropriate refresh time (in seconds). If the assets are not available upon refresh the stale files are served.

// hostnames for which "GET" requests can be proxied over "HTTP" (no ssl)
$hostnames = array(
	'fonts.gstatic.com',
	'maxcdn.bootstrapcdn.com',
	'netdna.bootstrapcdn.com',
	'fonts.googleapis.com',
	'ajax.googleapis.com',
);

// maximum age of a file before being refreshed
$refresh_age = 24*3600;

// directory where the cache resides (should exist and not be served)
$cache_dir = '/tmp/cache';

// strip the leading "/proxy.php/" from the URL
$url = substr($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], strlen($_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'].'/'));

// if there is no URL specified show bad request error
if(!$url || !strpos($url,'/')){
	header('Bad Request', true, 400);
	exit;
}

// get the hostname which should be the first segment (until the first slash)
$hostname = substr($url, 0, strpos($url, '/'));

// if the hostname is not in the list of allowed hostnames show forbidden error
if (!in_array($hostname, $hostnames)) {
	header('Forbidden', true, 403);
	exit;
}

// calculate the cached filename and check whether it already exists
$filename = $cache_dir.'/'.md5($url);
$file_exists = file_exists($filename);

// get the file age if the file exists
if ($file_exists) {
	$file_age = time()-filemtime($filename);
}

// if cache exists and is fresh, let's read the file, else retrieve it with cURL
if ($file_exists && $file_age<$refresh_age) {
	$result = file_get_contents($filename);
} else {
	// set some headers on the cURL call to pretend we are a user
	$sent_headers = array();
	foreach (array('User-Agent','Accept','Accept-Language','Referer') as $header) {
		$key = 'HTTP_'.strtoupper(str_replace('-','_',$header));
		if (isset($_SERVER[$key])) {
			$sent_headers[] = $header.': '.$_SERVER[$key];
		}
	}

	// make sure we do net get chunked, deflated or gzipped content
	$sent_headers[] = 'Accept-Encoding: ';
	$sent_headers[] = 'Cache-Control: max-age=0';
	$sent_headers[] = 'Connection: keep-alive';

	// initialize cURL with the URL, our headers and set headers retrieval on
	$curl = curl_init('http://'.$url);
	curl_setopt_array($curl, array(
			CURLOPT_HEADER => true,
			CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true,
			CURLOPT_BINARYTRANSFER => true,
			CURLOPT_HTTPHEADER => $sent_headers
	));

	// execute cURL call and get status code
	$result = curl_exec($curl);
	$status = curl_getinfo($curl, CURLINFO_HTTP_CODE);
	curl_close($curl);

	if ($status == 200) {
		// file was successfully retrieved
		if (file_put_contents($filename, $result)===false) {
			// show error on unsuccessful write
			header('Internal Server Error', true, 500);
			exit;
		}
	} else if ($file_exists) {
		// serve stale
		$result = file_get_contents($filename);
		// reset refresh timer
		touch($filename);
	}

}

// split the message in raw headers and body
if (strpos($result,"\r\n\r\n")!==false) {
	list($raw_headers,$body) = explode("\r\n\r\n", $result, 2);
} else {
	list($raw_headers,$body) = array($result,'');
}

// convert raw headers into an array
$raw_headers = explode("\n", $raw_headers);

// parse raw headers into received headers
$received_headers = array();
foreach ($raw_headers as $h) {
	$h = explode(':', $h, 2);
	if (isset($h[1])) {
		$received_headers[$h[0]] = trim($h[1]);
	}
}

// set certain headers for the output
$headers = array('Content-Type','Content-Encoding','Cache-Control','ETag','Last-Modified','Vary');
foreach ($headers as $header) {
	if (isset($received_headers[$header])) {
		header($header.': '.$received_headers[$header]);
	}
}

// replace the absolute URL's in the output
foreach ($hostnames as $hostname) {
	$body = preg_replace('/(https?:)?\/\/'.str_replace('.','\.',$hostname).'\//',
		$_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'].'/'.$hostname.'/', $body);
}

// set the new content length properly
header('Content-Length: '.strlen($body));

// echo the contents of the body
echo $body;

Best thing since sliced bread.. And only 128 lines of PHP code! Source code is on Github:

https://github.com/mevdschee/asset-proxy.php

The post PHP asset proxy increases website availability appeared first on LeaseWeb Labs.