Requesting Image Assets from external Api using a proxy - php

Question

I am trying to access images from an external API using guzzle in laravel, however, as understandably the calls are becoming really expensive and have a drastic effect on page loading time. I know that a proxy call would solve the issue, however, is there any way of achieving that in laravel where a certain endpoint can act as a proxy and can return an image. Thanks

Answer 1

I found a solution to my own problem and will post an answer. Mind you, there are better solutions i.e. configuring your server to handle such calls. However, in context of Laravel, here is what I did.
The data I had to work with
[
"orientation" => "portrait"
"fig_type" => "diagram"
"id" => "A_SDEF-05-2016-0003001"
"position" => "float"
"label" => "Figure 1."
"caption" => "some caption"
"link" => "/resource/id/A_SDEF-05-2016-0003001.tif"
]
Solution :
Step 1
Loop through the data using collections in Laravel as in its function;
// Pass the link as a get request parameter to laravel route
// i.e. localhost/proxy/image?link=resource/id/A_SDEF-05-2016-0003001.tif
return collect($images)->each(function ( $image )
{
if ($image['link']) {
$image['link'] = ltrim($image['link'],'/');
return $image['link'] ="link={$image['link']}";
}
return $image;
});
Step 2
Register an endpoint in routes file e.g.
Route::get('/proxy/image', 'ProxyController#request_image');
Step 3
The controller method i.e. request_image makes a Guzzle request and return the response as:
$link = request('link');
return \Response::stream(function() use($image){
echo $image;
},200, [$headers]);
Step 4
Have a static function or a regular function to output some dynamic html that you will build however in img src you would call ProxyController image method i.e.
$img = '<img src="'. action('ProxyController#request_image',$image['link']).'") >";
-Step 5
Output the html in blade
{!! Asset::image($image) !!} // Just output the built html
Hope it helps :D