Icon Image Proxy in Perl

Question

I'm trying to figure out the right way to serve icon files for our site listings. Basically an icon for a listing can come from an image file from a handful of different services (Flickr, Picasa, Google Static Maps, our own internal image hosting service, etc). The URL of the icon is stored in our database so I'd like to enable each listing icon to be displayed by simply calling:

http://www.example.com/listing/1234/icon

Currently I have been using CGI.pm to do a redirect to the correct icon URL, however, I want the file to be directly displayed without having to do a 301 redirect. Here is the code for what we've been using:

my $url = "http://www.example-service.com/image-123.gif";
print $query->redirect(-url=>$url);

I would appreciate any suggestions and code examples of on how I could update this to serve the file via proxy without having to redirect the user. Thanks in advance for your help!

Answer 1

Use LWP to get the remote file and print it out.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl
use LWP::UserAgent;
use CGI;
my $q = CGI->new;
my $ua = LWP::UserAgent->new;
$ua->agent("MyApp/0.1");
my $url = 'http://www.example-service.com/image-123.gif';

# Create a request
my $req = HTTP::Request->new(GET => $url);

my $res = $ua->request($req);

if ($res->is_success) {
        print $q->header( $res->content_type );
        print $res->content;
} else {
        print $q->header( 'text/plain', $res->status_line );
        print $res->status_line, "\n";
}

Alternatively you could write a trigger for your database which downloads the image for the listing and stores it either in the webroot somewhere or in the database itself when you add a new listing.