XF 2.1 Image Proxy Solutions

[bebosny]

Hello,

My forum runs behind Cloudflare and to prevent the origin IP from being revealed I'm looking to proxy http img embeds of my forum through a different server.
There's some services out there, such as https://images.weserv.nl/ where you can append an image to an URL and it'll proxy it for you (including caching, CDN, etc). It's free too so it seems somewhat unnecessary to host a separate server for image proxying.

It works like this:
Let's say you're trying to proxy this image because it's not HTTPS:

http://i.imgur.com/FLU5cl6.png

You would convert the URL to this and it would serve over HTTPS:

https://images.weserv.nl/?url=http://i.imgur.com/FLU5cl6.png

Initially I thought I could achieve this behaviour using the XenForo config.php proxy option like this:

$config['proxyUrlFormat'] = 'proxy.php?{type}=https://images.weserv.nl/?url={url}';

Unfortunately, the way XF and weserv parse links is a bit different. XenForo will return this as result when reading the URL:

https://(forumURL)/proxy.php?image=https://images.weserv.nl/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fi.imgur.com%2FFLU5cl6.png

I'm hoping anyone can help without me having to setup a separate proxy server.

Thanks in advance!

 

[Kirby]

$config['http']['proxy'] might help

 

[bebosny]

$config['http']['proxy'] might help

Mind elaborating a little? I've found very little documentation on that config option and I didn't really understand it when I tried playing around with it.

 

[Kirby]

This option allows you to set a HTTP proxy server for the Guzzle HTTP Client which is used to fetch data like images for XF image proxy.

Request Options — Guzzle Documentation

 

[Chromaniac]

is this supposed to be installed on an external server or something you install on the same server as xenforo install?

 

[Jeremy P]

If you're looking to hide the IP of your origin server, you would want to install the proxy on an external server.

 

[bluecrab]

I'm in the same situation. I have my forum behind Cloudflare to hide my origin via https and I'm using AWS SES to route outgoing email which effectively blocks my origin in the email headers. Now I need to come up with a solution to proxy images and/or block hotlinking to force everyone to upload their images directly to my site, otherwise, my origin IP is revealed in the http logs from where the image is fetched.

I see that Guzzle supports image proxy, but not sure how to get that working.

Does anyone have a solution?

 

[bebosny]

I'm in the same situation. I have my forum behind Cloudflare to hide my origin via https and I'm using AWS SES to route outgoing email which effectively blocks my origin in the email headers. Now I need to come up with a solution to proxy images and/or block hotlinking to force everyone to upload their images directly to my site, otherwise, my origin IP is revealed in the http logs from where the image is fetched.

I see that Guzzle supports image proxy, but not sure how to get that working.

Does anyone have a solution?

Hi there,

I ended setting up tinyproxy on a VPS from OVH (+-2 eur per month). Great solution and so far haven't had any issues.

Feel free to message me if you need help.

 

[bebosny]

To help others that stumble upon this post:

So yes, to verify, I followed this tutorial: https://xenforo.com/community/threa...xy-for-config-http-proxy.169192/#post-1371073

After that, I added the following to my config.php

$config['http']['proxy'] = 'tcp://1.1.1.1:8888';

I kept an eye on the TinyProxy log (/var/log/tinyproxy/tinyproxy.log) and used https://grabify.link/ in combination with an imgur image and the xenforo proxy testing tool (admin.php?tools/test-image-proxy) to verify the image is being proxied and the server IP is being hidden.