RawGit – GitHub CDN system | Hacker News Reader

RawGit – GitHub CDN system

rawgit.com

57 pointsopusdie23 comments

The link should be changed to http://rawgit.com/#cdn. New part is at the very bottom about version that can be used in production cdn.rawgit.com, but most comments here seem to miss that part.

Don't use it for production they say, then you look at the sites on http://rawgit.com/stats.html and facepalm.

Not to be the buzz kill, but the reason raw.githubusercontent.com is text/plain and X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff is to keep people from using it as a CDN, because: it's not. The files aren't served static from github: https://github.com/blog/1482-heads-up-nosniff-header-support...

EDIT: I mixed up the move of Pages to .io, updated with the right blog post.

> Not to be the buzz kill, but the reason raw.githubusercontent.com is text/plain and X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff is to keep people from using it as a CDN, because: it's not.

Right, but nothing about this disputes or takes issue with that. The purpose of RawGit is to provide a drop-in replacement URL for use cases where such linking would be desirable from a dev or testing standpoint: it reads the raw version and then serves it statically.

There's a CDN option as well: http://rawgit.com/#cdn

It's very useful and nice, but the emphasis on "if you use it too much we'll serve evil.js" makes me nervous — I somewhat trust you, random guy on the internet, but I think you talk about this more than I'd like.

Edit: The best analyogy I can think of is it's like going on a date with someone who talks about their ex- constantly. Not bad in itself but enough to make you think twice.

Well yes you wouldn't want a lasting relationship with that guy, but I only really need him for one evening so I don't show up to the dance without a date. Because then I'd just look silly.

If you read further down, there is a production friendly option

Another handy alternative to this site is http://cdnjs.com/ and their repo is located here: https://github.com/cdnjs/cdnjs.

This is typically what I use to offload hosted JS to a CDN although CloudFlare does a very good job. I had a problem early on with MaxCDN which powers http://www.bootstrapcdn.com/. While building http://gitignore.io, I had one pretty bad outage just as I was trying to promote the site so I first switched to cdn.js and then to CloudFlare and have been happy ever since.

This has existed for a while as rawgithub.com. Super useful, great to demo things that are in progress.

That's really useful. I've wanted this exact thing a couple of times.

They say not to use this CDN for anything production related, but I personally think you shouldn't be using any public JS CDN for anything that matters.

reasoning here :

http://daemon.co.za/2014/03/from-trenches-js-cdn-point-of-fa...

If you check the bottom of the page, you'll see they've set up a production-ready CDN via MaxCDN: http://rawgit.com/#cdn

Yes, I recommend not using using any public cdn. That includes cdnjs, google hosted libraries, maxcdn. anything.

I think that you will inevitably end up needing to host code that uses the external dependencies, and you should host your libraries from the same 'place' that your code ends up on.

It's about data locality and reducing moving parts.

Also, using an external CDN will end to more downtime.

You'll never benefit from having your CDN up if your own servers are down.

Thinking about it now, if you could host your own code via the CDN (which this implies), that's perfectly fine with me.

It's late =P

I'm leaving my sibling comment untouched since my point still stands.

It's useful, but I really want it to host secret (unlisted) Gists.

I'm hoping JSBin will do so soon. There's a promising issue about it (https://github.com/jsbin/jsbin/issues/1094) and it will be an ideal tool for semi-private code demos as well as markdown writing if supported.

Secret gists are supported. If you've got a raw secret gist URL that's not working, let me know. Probably best to tweet @yaypie or @rawgit; I don't look at HN often.

This is just rawgithub.com on a new URL right?

I suppose they changed when github stopped using the raw.github.com host, so although this makes it a little more generic, it's lost the biggest usability advantage it had in that you could just delete the dot between "raw" and "github" and hey presto.

All together - wish this was on rawgithubusercontent.com !

Here's source of evil.js that will be served if you are going to abuse rawgit.com and use it on production.

https://github.com/rgrove/rawgithub/blob/master/public/js/ev...

See also everydayimmirror.in : https://github.com/jbourassa/mirrorin

This is one of those services that I didn't realize I needed until I saw it and now I can't believe it didn't exist. Thanks!

Isn't yaypie (dude behind RawGit) one of the people on Evil.js?

Nope, I just use it.

Just use gh-pages

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