Add setting to return 301 or 302 response for images

This is less of an SEO consideration and more of a technical deployment issue. RFC 7231 is relevant here.

6.4.2. 301 Moved Permanently

6.4.3. 302 Found

I will note that s3fs proactively takes action to purge pages from the cache that use the image style route upon an image derivative being generated to reduce the number of locations that these links exist (primarily as a sever load mitigation though it is relevant here as it also mitigates search engines seeing style links).

A key issue is that an image style derivative may be deleted at any time. A client(browser) may need to load the generation URL in the future to obtain a working image. If a browser observes a 301 and the image style cache is than purged the client upon reloading the page may observe the image style request link and incorrectly (as it relates to s3fs operations) visit the S3 bucket directly leading to a 404 with no way for the user to generate the image.

I'm inclined to won't-fix this as we have a necessary technical reason to use 301's unless reason can be provided to justify ignoring the RFC's for web responses that resolve the fault cases related to 301's.

A site owner can use a cache warming module if they wish to avoid redirects. If the image derivative already exists at page render time s3fs will generate the link directly to the object in the s3 bucket.

Hi @cmlara,

Thanks for the thorough response.

I see that the image urls on my site are actually pointing to the cdn domain and loading the file directly from the cdn s3 bucket; not using the /s3 path. I'm okay with closing this ticket.

Glad existing features are working for you!

Closing the issue.