An nginx config to cache unsplash, to get around their very annoying rate limit

Unsplash has a rate limit of 50 requests per hour for unverified API clients. Their verification process is rather complex (and the use case of a static-site generator is apparently unheard off), so there needs to be an alternative.

This nginx config (and resulting Docker container) caches Unsplash's API, allowing it to act as a centralised cache for API requests, bypassing the API restrictions. A valid API token is still required.

version: "2.3"

services:
  web:
    image: theorangeone/unsplash-cache:latest
    tmpfs:
      - /tmp/unsplash-cache
    ports:
      - "80:80"

If you want the cache to persist between container restarts, mount /tmp/unsplash-cache to a given directory.

Instead of sending requests to api.unsplash.com, send them to this container instead.

• Cached responses are kept for 21 days.
• The cache cannot grow beyond 1GB.
• The cache key size should store around 10k records