How to Make a Domain Proxy for Digital Ocean Spaces
Digital Ocean has been my go to solution for hosting for many years. When the Spaces service, an S3 compatible object store, was introduceed, I jumped on board right away. The service performs well and allows me to manage all the web infrastructure from one location.
The drawback with Spaces, to me, is how custom domains are handled. It is possible to do, but you have to turn over DNS control of the domain to Digital Ocean. That is not always possible or practical to do. For a couple years I have run various sites with the domain provided by Digital Ocean.
A default Spaces domain has the format: account.datacenter.digitaloceanspaces.com
For my personal blog this looks like: lobaugh.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com
A useable, but not very attractive domain. I decided to revisit the topic.
Nginx has some powerful proxy capabilities in it, and it turns out that it works quite well to create a domain proxy.
With the proxy enabled, visiting
https://assets.lobaugh.net/image.png
Will return the file from
https://lobaugh.sfo2.digitaloceanspaces.com/image.png
Running my own domain proxy does introduce additional complexity and slight overhead…
