What is the best way to serve static files after authenticating with remix-auth?

[vedantroy]

It's pretty easy to serve static files inside of the public folder, but I'm using remix-auth, and I'd like to serve a static file only if the user has been authenticated.

It's somewhat easy to do by reading the entire file into an ArrayBuffer and then constructing a response with the ArrayBuffer, but ideally, I'd be able to serve the file with support for things like range requests, and the ArrayBuffer technique makes this impossible.

[kiliman]

What adapter are you using? If you use Express you can check for the auth cookie in your static file handler.

[vedantroy]

The issue is, it's not enough to just check for the auth cookie -- I also want to do database calls based on the user id stored in the auth cookie. So I need to deserialize the auth cookie, (I believe normally remix-auth handles this?)

[kiliman]

I'm not sure I understand. I thought you needed to protect static files. Typically you let the server handle that so you don't have to read the file directly. That's why I said to check the cookie in your static file handler.

Are you saying you can't trust the cookie and need to verify it against the database first?

[sergiodxa]

Maybe the cookie has a userId and he needs to do a DB query to get the user and check if it has permissions to read the file.

I would do it inside a resource route, then use fs.readFile to read the file and send it.

[vedantroy]

Maybe the cookie has a userId and he needs to do a DB query to get the user and check if it has permissions to read the file.

I would do it inside a resource route, then use fs.readFile to read the file and send it.

This is exactly correct. The issue is, doing fs.readFile is not very fast because I believe it sends back the file as a giant binary blob. This isn't optimal because there is no support for range requests.

E.g, PDF.js supports using range-requests to load a file in small chunks, which allows users to see a PDF much faster.
With this current method, my loading times for a single file are on the order of 10+ seconds instead of ~ 1 second.

[sergiodxa]

It should be possible to read the file as a stream and send the stream to the browser so you send byte by byte ID the file as your read it