DEV_IMAGE_PROXY_MODE

[hcooper]

One of the main problems with creating development environments is the need for a complete copy of images/ to be present locally.

I came up with this clever trick to avoid the need. Development instance can use images (and kmls/pdf/etc) directly from production.

The dev site will function as normal, albeit uploading images/kml will fail (but not often required in development).

I've been using this for the last week, and it's worked surprisingly well. Initially I tried complex POSIX to http fuse proxies, then stumbled onto this.

I documented it here: https://github.com/RopeWiki/app/wiki/Image-Proxy-Mode

[BenjaminPelletier]

The proxy_pass approach is super clever and super useful -- thanks!

There is an ongoing discussion on Discord regarding documentation and my relevant comment for this PR is that it seems like having the documentation as part of this PR would be even nicer than having it in the wiki. Not only would that content be reviewable as an element of the PR, its current content would be captured as a snapshot of "this is how this feature worked at this time". This is valuable, for instance, if later trying to troubleshoot an issue that has been isolated to have been introduced somewhere between this PR and some later PR. Something like git bisect but following procedures specified in the documentation could be substantially more difficult if the troubleshooter had to reverse-engineer what the documentation was at each point in that bisect workflow if the documentation had changed between this PR and the later PR.

However, I think this would be a good PR even without the good documentation in the wiki, so it improves things without regressing anything, so approved by me regardless of documentation discussion outcome.