Nginx proxy redirect to another URI

Use the X-Accel-Redirect header in combination with a special Nginx location to have Nginx proxy the remote file.

Here is the location to add to your Nginx configuration:

# Proxy download location ~* ^/internal_redirect/(.*?)/(.*) {  # Do not allow people to mess with this location directly  # Only internal redirects are allowed  internal;  # Location-specific logging  access_log logs/internal_redirect.access.log main;  error_log logs/internal_redirect.error.log warn;  # Extract download url from the request  set $download_uri $2;  set $download_host $1;  # Compose download url  set $download_url http://$download_host/$download_uri;  # Set download request headers  proxy_set_header Host $download_host;  proxy_set_header Authorization '';  # The next two lines could be used if your storage   # backend does not support Content-Disposition   # headers used to specify file name browsers use   # when save content to the disk  proxy_hide_header Content-Disposition;  add_header Content-Disposition 'attachment; filename="$args"';  # Do not touch local disks when proxying   # content to clients  proxy_max_temp_file_size 0;  # Download the file and send it to client  proxy_pass $download_url;}

Now you just have to set the X-Accel-Redirect header in your responses to Nginx:

# This header will ask nginx to download a file # from http://some.site.com/secret/url.ext and send it to userX-Accel-Redirect: /internal_redirect/some.site.com/secret/url.ext# This header will ask nginx to download a file # from http://blah.com/secret/url and send it to user as cool.pdfX-Accel-Redirect: /internal_redirect/blah.com/secret/url?cool.pdf

The full solution was found here. I suggest reading it before implementing.