SERVING LARGE FILES IN RAILS WITH A REVERSE PROXY SERVER

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Rail apps can efficiently serve large files using the X-Sendfile pattern, which offloads file delivery to a reverse proxy server like Nginx. Instead of loading files into memory, Rails handles authentication, then sends a special header (X-Sendfile or X-Accel-Redirect) with the file path, and the web server streams the file directly to the client.