The private file view will serve the permission-checked media files by delegating to one of its server backends. The ones bundled with django-filer live in filer.server.backends and it is easy to create new ones.

The default is filer.server.backends.default.DefaultServer. It is suitable for development and serves the file directly from django.

More suitiable for production are server backends that delegate the actual file serving to an upstream webserver.

location: filer.server.backends.nginx.NginxXAccelRedirectServer

nginx docs about this stuff: http://wiki.nginx.org/XSendfile

in settings.py:

from filer.server.backends.nginx import NginxXAccelRedirectServer
from filer.storage import PrivateFileSystemStorage

FILER_PRIVATEMEDIA_STORAGE = PrivateFileSystemStorage(
                       path='/path/to/smedia/filer',
                       base_url='/smedia/filer/')
FILER_PRIVATEMEDIA_SERVER = NginxXAccelRedirectServer(
                       location='/path/to/smedia/filer',
                       nginx_location='/nginx_filer_private')

FILER_PRIVATEMEDIA_THUMBNAIL_STORAGE = PrivateFileSystemStorage(
                       location='/path/to/smedia/filer_thumbnails',
                       base_url='/smedia/filer_thumbnails/')
FILER_PRIVATEMEDIA_THUMBNAIL_SERVER = NginxXAccelRedirectServer(
                       location='/path/to/smedia/filer_thumbnails',
                       nginx_location='/nginx_filer_private_thumbnails')

nginx_location is the location directive where nginx "hides" permission-checked files from general access. A fitting nginx configuration might look something like this:

location /nginx_filer_private/ {
  internal;
  alias /path/to/smedia/filer/;
}
location /nginx_filer_private_thumbnails/ {
  internal;
  alias /path/to/smedia/filer_thumbnails/;
}

NginxXAccelRedirectServer will add the a X-Accel-Redirect header to the response instead of actually loading and delivering the file itself. The value in the header will be something like /nginx_filer_private/2011/03/04/myfile.pdf. Nginx picks this up and does the actual file delivery while the django backend is free to do other stuff again.

location: filer.server.backends.xsendfile.ApacheXSendfileServer

Once you have mod_xsendfile installed on your apache server you can configure the settings.

in settings.py:

from filer.server.backends.xsendfile import ApacheXSendfileServer

FILER_PRIVATEMEDIA_SERVER = ApacheXSendfileServer()
FILER_PRIVATEMEDIA_THUMBNAIL_SERVER = ApacheXSendfileServer()

in your apache configuration:

XSendFilePath /path/to/smedia/

XSendFilePath is a whitelist for directories where apache will serve files from.