Skip to content

Imagor

Imagor is a "fast, secure image processing server" used by Spacebar for external image resizing, primarily by embeds from other websites when linked in a message. If left unused, Spacebar will simply not provide a proxy_url for clients, which may leave external images unavailable or cause the client to download directly from the image host. Downloading images directly from the host may lead to privacy concerns, as an attacker may be able to learn users IP addresses.

Dependencies

Setup

To setup Imagor for Spacebar, first grab the security_requestSignature config value from Spacebar's database, and create a imagor.env file somewhere safe, with the following content. Make sure to edit the file with the correct information. Your requestSignture should not start or end with ".

IMAGOR_SECRET=security_requestSignature value from your Spacebar config
PORT=8000

You can now start Imagor with

docker run --env-file ./imagor.env -p 8000:8000 shumc/imagor

8000 here is our port. Make sure that it'd available to people outside your network. If you would like to change the port Imagor listens on, be sure to change both the PORT value in imagor.env, and the -p value used in docker.

If you're using a reverse proxy such as Nginx for Spacebar already, you could add this to your config's server block

location /media/ {
 # If you changed the port, be sure to change it here too
 proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000/;
}

Along with any additional config you already have, of course. Alternative (and perhaps the better choice) would be to create a new domain, say media.example.com specifically for Imagor.

Example config for media.example.com site 
server {
 # Change the server_name to reflect your true domain
    server_name media.example.com;

    add_header Last-Modified $date_gmt;
    proxy_set_header Host $host;
    proxy_pass_request_headers on;
    proxy_set_header X-Forwarded-For $remote_addr;

    location / {
   # If you had changed the port, change it here as well
            proxy_pass http://127.0.0.1:8000;
    }
}

Our last step is to simply tell Spacebar about Imagor. Just set the cdn_imagorServerUrl config value to your public endpoint for Imagor, wrapped in quotes.

For example, if you used the /media location in your existing nginx config, it will look something like "https://your.spacebar.chat/media". If you used a subdomain, it will look like "https://media.your.spacebar.chat". Don't include a trailing backslash.

Congrats! After a restart, you've now got Imagor resizing your images!