This module provide easy Content Delivery Network integration for Backdrop CMS. It alters file URLs, so that files are downloaded from a CDN instead of your web server.
It provides two modes: "Origin Pull" and "File Conveyor".
In "Origin Pull" mode, only "Origin Pull" CDNs are supported (hence the name). These are CDNs that only require you to replace the domain name with another domain name. The CDN will then automatically fetch (pull) the files from your server (the origin).
In "File Conveyor" mode, this module integrates with the File Conveyor [1] daemon. This allows for much more advanced setups: files can be processed (e.g. optimize images like smush.it [2], minify CSS with YUI Compressor [3], minify JS with YUI compressor or Google Closure Compiler [4], and it's easy to add your own!), before they are synced and your CDN doesn't have to support Origin Pull, any push method is fine (supported transfer protocols: FTP, Amazon S3, Rackspace CloudFiles). File Conveyor is flexible enough to be used with any CDN, thus it enables you to avoid vendor lock-in.
If you're not sure which mode to use, use "Origin Pull". It's easier and more reliable. Every single common CDN today (2015) supports Origin Pull.
Note: It is essential that you understand the key properties of a CDN, most importantly the differences between an Origin Pull CDN and a Push CDN. A good (and compact!) reference is the "Key Properties of a CDN" article [5].
The CDN module aims to do only one thing and do it well: altering URLs to point to files on CDNs. However, in later versions, it does as much as possible to make CDN integration frictionless: • Any sort of CDN mapping • optimal Far Future expiration (http://drupal.org/node/974350)
But in some cases, simply altering the URL is not enough, that's where the AdvAgg module comes in:
If you've ever had any issues with CSS or JS files not behaving as
desired, check out AdvAgg. The "Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation" module solves
all issues that arise from having CSS/JS served from a CDN. Keeping track
of changes to CSS/JS files, smart aggregate names, 404 protection,
on-demand generation, works with private file system, Google CDN
integration, CSS/JS compression, GZIP compression, caching, and smart
bundling are some of the things AdvAgg does. It's also faster then core's
file aggregation.[1] http://fileconveyor.org/ [2] http://smushit.com/ [3] http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/compressor/ [4] http://code.google.com/closure/compiler/ [5] http://wimleers.com/article/key-properties-of-a-cdn
Install this module using the official Backdrop CMS instructions at https://backdropcms.org/guide/modules.
Visit the configuration page under Administration > Configuration > Development > CDN (admin/config/development/cdn) to learn about the various settings.
Go to your CDN provider's control panel and set up a "CDN instance" (Amazon
CloudFront calls this a "distribution"). There, you will have to specify
the origin server (Amazon CloudFront calls this a "custom origin"), which
is simply the domain name of your Backdrop site.
The CDN will provide you with a "delivery address", this is the address
that we'll use to download files from the CDN instead of the Backdrop server.
Suppose this is http://d85nwn7m5gl3y.cloudfront.net.
Be sure to forward query strings from the CDN to the origin! Otherwise image
style derivatives will not work.
(It acts like a globally distributed, super fast proxy server.)
Relevant links:
Optionally, you can create a CNAME alias to the delivery address on your DNS server. This way, it's not immediately obvious from the links in the HTMl that you're using an external service (that's why it's also called a vanity domain name). However, if you're going to use your CDN in HTTPS mode, then using vanity domains will break things (because SSL certificates are bound to domain names).
Enter the domain name (http://d85nwn7m5gl3y.cloudfront.net, or the vanity
domain/CNAME if you used that instead) at admin/settings/cdn/details. If
you want to support HTTPS transparently, it is recommended to enter it as
//d85nwn7m5gl3y.cloudfront.net instead — this is a protocol-relative URL.
Visit the Status Report under Administration > Reports > Status (admin/reports/status). The CDN module will report its status here.
Enable the display of statistics at "admin/config/development/cdn", browse your site with your root/admin (user id 1) account. The statistics will show which files are served from the CDN!
If your site is behind a reverse proxy such as Varnish, so that your stack looks like: CDN <-> reverse proxy <-> web server, then you need to take extra measures if you want to prevent duplicate content showing up on the CDN. See https://www.drupal.org/node/2678374#comment-11278951 for details. It's possible in this situation to end up with redirect loops; for that reason the CDN module adds a debugging header to the 301 redirects it emits in order to facilitate troubleshooting.
Additional documentation is located in the Wiki: https://github.com/backdrop-contrib/cdn/wiki/Documentation.
Bugs and Feature requests should be reported in the Issue Queue: https://github.com/backdrop-contrib/cdn/issues.
This project is GPL v2 software. See the LICENSE.txt file in this directory for complete text.