imaginary

Fast HTTP microservice written in Go for high-level image processing backed by bimg and libvips. imaginary can be used as private or public HTTP service for massive image processing. It's almost dependency-free and only uses net/http native package for better performance.

Supports multiple image operations exposed as a simple HTTP API, with additional optional features such as API token authorization, gzip compression, HTTP traffic throttle strategy and CORS support for web clients.

imaginary can read images from HTTP payloads, server local path or remote HTTP servers, supporting JPEG, PNG, WEBP, and optionally TIFF, PDF, GIF and SVG formats if [email protected]+ is compiled with proper library bindings.

imaginary is able to output images as JPEG, PNG and WEBP formats, including transparent conversion across them.

imaginary also optionally supports image placeholder fallback mechanism in case of image processing error or server error of any nature, therefore an image will be always returned by the server in terms of HTTP response body and content MIME type, even in case of error, matching the expected image size and format transparently.

It uses internally libvips, a powerful and efficient library written in C for image processing which requires a low memory footprint and it's typically 4x faster than using the quickest ImageMagick and GraphicsMagick settings or Go native image package, and in some cases it's even 8x faster processing JPEG images.

To get started, take a look the installation steps, usage cases and API docs.

imaginary is currently used in production processing thousands of images per day.

Supported image operations

Resize
Enlarge
Crop
Rotate (with auto-rotate based on EXIF orientation)
Flip (with auto-flip based on EXIF metadata)
Flop
Zoom
Thumbnail
Configurable image area extraction
Embed/Extend image, supporting multiple modes (white, black, mirror, copy or custom background color)
Watermark (customizable by text)
Custom output color space (RGB, black/white...)
Format conversion (with additional quality/compression settings)
Info (image size, format, orientation, alpha...)
Reply with default or custom placeholder image in case of error.

Prerequisites

libvips v7.40.0+ or 8+ (8.3+ recommended)
C compatible compiler such as gcc 4.6+ or clang 3.0+
Go 1.3+

Installation

go get -u github.com/h2non/imaginary

Also, be sure you have the latest version of bimg:

go get -u gopkg.in/h2non/bimg.v1

libvips

Run the following script as sudo (supports OSX, Debian/Ubuntu, Redhat, Fedora, Amazon Linux):

curl -s https://raw.githubusercontent.com/lovell/sharp/master/preinstall.sh | sudo bash -

The install script requires curl and pkg-config

Docker

See Dockerfile for image details.

Fetch the image (comes with latest stable Go and libvips versions)

docker pull h2non/imaginary

Start the container with optional flags (default listening on port 9000)

docker run -p 9000:9000 h2non/imaginary -cors -gzip

Start the container in debug mode:

docker run -p 9000:9000 -e "DEBUG=*" h2non/imaginary

Enter to the interactive shell in a running container

sudo docker exec -it <containerIdOrName> bash

Stop the container

docker stop h2non/imaginary

You can see all the Docker tags here.

Heroku

Click on the Heroku button to easily deploy your app:

Or alternatively you can follow the manual steps:

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/h2non/imaginary.git

Set the buildpack for your application

heroku config:add BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/h2non/heroku-buildpack-imaginary.git

Optionally, define the PKGCONFIG path:

heroku config:add PKG_CONFIG_PATH=/app/vendor/vips/lib/pkgconfig

Add Heroku git remote:

heroku git:remote -a your-application

Deploy it!

git push heroku master

Recommended resources

Given the multithreaded native nature of Go, in terms of CPUs, most cores means more concurrency and therefore, a better performance can be achieved. From the other hand, in terms of memory, 512MB of RAM is usually enough for small services with low concurrency (<5 requests/second). Up to 2GB for high-load HTTP service processing potentially large images or exposed to an eventual high concurrency.

If you need to expose imaginary as public HTTP server, it's highly recommended to protect the service against DDoS-like attacks. imaginary has built-in support for HTTP concurrency throttle strategy to deal with this in a more convenient way and mitigate possible issues limiting the number of concurrent requests per second and caching the awaiting requests, if necessary.

Production notes

In production focused environments it's highly recommended to enable the HTTP concurrency throttle strategy in your imaginary servers.

The recommended concurrency limit per server to guarantee a good performance is up to 20 requests per second.

You can enable it simply passing a flag to the binary:

$ imaginary -concurrency 20

Scalability

If you're looking for a large scale solution for massive image processing, you should scale imaginary horizontally, distributing the HTTP load across a pool of imaginary servers.

Assuming that you want to provide a high availability to deal efficiently with, let's say, 100 concurrent req/sec, a good approach would be using a front end balancer (e.g: HAProxy) to delegate the traffic control flow, ensure the quality of service and distribution the HTTP across a pool of servers:

        |==============|
        |  Dark World  |
        |==============|
              ||||
        |==============|
        |   Balancer   |
        |==============|
           |       |   
          /         \
         /           \
        /             \
 /-----------\   /-----------\
 | imaginary |   | imaginary | (*n)
 \-----------/   \-----------/

Clients

node.js/io.js

Feel free to send a PR if you created a client for other language.

Performance

libvips is probably the faster open source solution for image processing. Here you can see some performance test comparisons for multiple scenarios:

libvips speed and memory usage
sharp performance tests
bimg (Go library with C bindings to libvips)

Benchmark

See benchmark.sh for more details

Environment: Go 1.4.2. libvips-7.42.3. OSX i7 2.7Ghz

Requests  [total]       200
Duration  [total, attack, wait]   10.030639787s, 9.949499515s, 81.140272ms
Latencies [mean, 50, 95, 99, max]   83.124471ms, 82.899435ms, 88.948008ms, 95.547765ms, 104.384977ms
Bytes In  [total, mean]     23443800, 117219.00
Bytes Out [total, mean]     175517000, 877585.00
Success   [ratio]       100.00%
Status Codes  [code:count]      200:200

Conclusions

imaginary can deal efficiently with up to 20 request per second running in a multicore machine, where it crops a JPEG image of 5MB and spending per each request less than 100 ms

The most expensive image operation under high concurrency scenarios (> 20 req/sec) is the image enlargement, which requires a considerable amount of math operations to scale the original image. In this kind of operation the required processing time usually grows over the time if you're stressing the server continuously. The advice here is as simple as taking care about the number of concurrent enlarge operations to avoid server performance bottlenecks.

Command-line usage

Usage:
  imaginary -p 80
  imaginary -cors -gzip
  imaginary -concurrency 10
  imaginary -path-prefix /api/v1
  imaginary -enable-url-source
  imaginary -enable-url-source -allowed-origins http://localhost,http://server.com
  imaginary -enable-url-source -enable-auth-forwarding
  imaginary -enable-url-source -authorization "Basic AwDJdL2DbwrD=="
	imaginary -enable-placeholder
	imaginery -enable-url-source -placeholder ./placeholder.jpg
	imaginary -h | -help
  imaginary -v | -version

Options:
  -a <addr>                 bind address [default: *]
  -p <port>                 bind port [default: 8088]
  -h, -help                 output help
  -v, -version              output version
  -path-prefix <value>      Url path prefix to listen to [default: "/"]
  -cors                     Enable CORS support [default: false]
  -gzip                     Enable gzip compression [default: false]
  -key <key>                Define API key for authorization
  -mount <path>             Mount server local directory
  -http-cache-ttl <num>     The TTL in seconds. Adds caching headers to locally served files.
  -http-read-timeout <num>  HTTP read timeout in seconds [default: 30]
  -http-write-timeout <num> HTTP write timeout in seconds [default: 30]
  -enable-url-source        Restrict remote image source processing to certain origins (separated by commas)
	-enable-placeholder       Enable image response placeholder to be used in case of error [default: false]
  -enable-auth-forwarding   Forwards X-Forward-Authorization or Authorization header to the image source server. -enable-url-source flag must be defined. Tip: secure your server from public access to prevent attack vectors
  -allowed-origins <urls>   TLS certificate file path
  -certfile <path>          TLS certificate file path
  -keyfile <path>           TLS private key file path
  -authorization <value>    Defines a constant Authorization header value passed to all the image source servers. -enable-url-source flag must be defined. This overwrites authorization headers forwarding behavior via X-Forward-Authorization
  -placeholder <path>       Image path to image custom placeholder to be used in case of error. Recommended minimum image size is: 1200x1200
	-concurreny <num>         Throttle concurrency limit per second [default: disabled]
  -burst <num>              Throttle burst max cache size [default: 100]
  -mrelease <num>           OS memory release interval in seconds [default: 30]
  -cpus <num>               Number of used cpu cores.
                            (default for current machine is 8 cores)

Start the server in a custom port:

imaginary -p 8080

Also, you can pass the port as environment variable:

PORT=8080 imaginary

Enable HTTP server throttle strategy (max 10 requests/second):

imaginary -p 8080 -concurrency 10

Enable remote URL image fetching (then you can do GET request passing the url=http://server.com/image.jpg query param):

imaginary -p 8080 -enable-url-source

Mount local directory (then you can do GET request passing the file=image.jpg query param):

imaginary -p 8080 -mount ~/images

Enable authorization header forwarding to image origin server. X-Forward-Authorization or Authorization (by priority) header value will be forwarded as Authorization header to the target origin server, if one of those headers are present in the incoming HTTP request. Security tip: secure your server from public access to prevent attack vectors when enabling this option:

imaginary -p 8080 -enable-url-source -enable-auth-forwarding

Or alternatively you can manually define an constant Authorization header value that will be always sent when fetching images from remote image origins. If defined, X-Forward-Authorization or Authorization headers won't be forwarded, and therefore ignored, if present. Note:

imaginary -p 8080 -enable-url-source -authorization "Bearer s3cr3t"

Send caching headers (only possible with the -mount option). The headers can be set in either "cache nothing" or "cache for N seconds". By specifying 0 imaginary will send the "don't cache" headers, otherwise it sends headers with a TTL. The following example informs the client to cache the result for 1 year:

imaginary -mount ~/images -http-cache-ttl 31556926

Enable placeholder image HTTP responses in case of server error/bad request. The placeholder image will be dynamically and transparently resized matching the expected image widthxheight define in the HTTP request params. Also, the placeholder image will be also transparently converted to the desired image type defined in the HTTP request params, so the API contract should be maintained as much better as possible.

This feature is particularly useful when using imaginary as public HTTP service consumed by Web clients. In case of error, the appropriate HTTP status code will be used to reflect the error, and the error details will be exposed serialized as JSON in the Error response HTTP header, for further inspection and convenience for API clients.

imaginary -p 8080 -enable-placeholder -enable-url-source

You can optionally use a custom placeholder image. Since the placeholder image should fit a variety of different sizes, it's recommended to use a large image, such as 1200x1200. Supported custom placeholder image types are: JPEG, PNG and WEBP.

imaginary -p 8080 -placeholder=placeholder.jpg -enable-url-source

Increase libvips threads concurrency (experimental):

VIPS_CONCURRENCY=10 imaginary -p 8080 -concurrency 10

Enable debug mode:

DEBUG=* imaginary -p 8080

Or filter debug output by package:

DEBUG=imaginary imaginary -p 8080

Examples

Reading a local image (you must pass the -mount=<directory> flag):

curl -O "http://localhost:8088/crop?width=500&height=400&file=foo/bar/image.jpg"

Fetching the image from a remote server (you must pass the -enable-url-source flag):

curl -O "http://localhost:8088/crop?width=500&height=400&url=https://raw.githubusercontent.com/h2non/imaginary/master/fixtures/large.jpg"

Playground

imaginary exposes an ugly HTML form for playground purposes in: http://localhost:8088/form

HTTP API

Authorization

imaginary supports a simple token-based API authorization. To enable it, you should pass the -key flag to the binary.

API token can be defined as HTTP header (API-Key) or query param (key).

Example request with API key:

POST /crop HTTP/1.1
Host: localhost:8088
API-Key: secret

Errors

imaginary will always reply with the proper HTTP status code and JSON body with error details.

Here an example response error when the payload is empty:

{
  "message": "Cannot read payload: no such file",
  "code": 1
}

See all the predefined supported errors here.

Placeholder

If -enable-placeholder or -placeholder <image path> flags are passed to imaginary, a placeholder image will be used in case of error or invalid request input.

If -enable-placeholder is passed, the default imaginary placeholder image will be used, however you can customized it via -placeholder flag, loading a custom compatible image from the file system.

Since imaginary has been partially designed to be used as public HTTP service, including web pages, in certain scenarios the response MIME type must be respected, so the server will always reply with a placeholder image in case of error, such as image processing error, read error, payload error, request invalid request or any other.

You can customize the placeholder image passing the -placeholder <image path> flag when starting imaginary.

In this scenarios, the error message details will be exposed in the Error response header field as JSON for further inspection from API clients.

In some edge cases the placeholder image resizing might fail, so a 400 Bad Request will be used as response status and the Content-Type will be application/json with the proper message info. Note that this scenario won't be common.

Form data

If you're pushing images to imaginary as multipart/form-data (you can do it as well as image/*), you must define at least one input field called file with the raw image data in order to be processed properly by imaginary.

Params

Complete list of available params. Take a look to each specific endpoint to see which params are supported. Image measures are always in pixels, unless otherwise indicated.

width int - Width of image area to extract/resize
height int - Height of image area to extract/resize
top int - Top edge of area to extract. Example: 100
left int - Left edge of area to extract. Example: 100
areawidth int - Height area to extract. Example: 300
areaheight int - Width area to extract. Example: 300
quality int - JPEG image quality between 1-100. Defaults to 80
compression int - PNG compression level. Default: 6
rotate int - Image rotation angle. Must be multiple of 90. Example: 180
factor int - Zoom factor level. Example: 2
margin int - Text area margin for watermark. Example: 50
dpi int - DPI value for watermark. Example: 150
textwidth int - Text area width for watermark. Example: 200
opacity float - Opacity level for watermark text. Default: 0.2
flip bool - Transform the resultant image with flip operation. Default: false
flop bool - Transform the resultant image with flop operation. Default: false
force bool - Force image transformation size. Default: false
nocrop bool - Disable crop transformation enabled by default by some operations. Default: false
noreplicate bool - Disable text replication in watermark. Defaults to false
norotation bool - Disable auto rotation based on EXIF orientation. Defaults to false
noprofile bool - Disable adding ICC profile metadata. Defaults to false
text string - Watermark text content. Example: copyright (c) 2189
font string - Watermark text font type and format. Example: sans bold 12
color string - Watermark text RGB decimal base color. Example: 255,200,150
type string - Specify the image format to output. Possible values are: jpeg, png and webp
gravity string - Define the crop operation gravity. Supported values are: north, south, centre, west and east. Defaults to centre.
file string - Use image from server local file path. In order to use this you must pass the -mount=<dir> flag.
url string - Fetch the image from a remove HTTP server. In order to use this you must pass the -enable-url-source flag.
colorspace string - Use a custom color space for the output image. Allowed values are: srgb or bw (black&white)
field string - Custom image form field name if using multipart/form. Defaults to: file
extend string - Extend represents the image extend mode used when the edges of an image are extended. Allowed values are: black, copy, mirror, white and background. If background value is specified, you can define the desired extend RGB color via background param, such as ?extend=background&background=250,20,10. For more info, see libvips docs.
background string - Background RGB decimal base color to use when flattening transparent PNGs. Example: 255,200,150

GET /

Content-Type: application/json

Serves as JSON the current imaginary, bimg and libvips versions.

Example response:

{
  "imaginary": "0.1.28",
  "bimg": "1.0.5",
  "libvips": "8.4.1"
}

GET /health

Content-Type: application/json

Provides some useful statistics about the server stats with the following structure:

uptime number - Server process uptime in seconds.
allocatedMemory number - Currently allocated memory in megabytes.
totalAllocatedMemory number - Total allocated memory over the time in megabytes.
gorouting number - Number of running gorouting.
cpus number - Number of used CPU cores.

Example response:

{
  "uptime": 1293,
  "allocatedMemory": 5.31,
  "totalAllocatedMemory": 34.3,
  "goroutines": 19,
  "cpus": 8
}

GET /form

Content Type: text/html

Serves an ugly HTML form, just for testing/playground purposes

GET | POST /info

Accepts: image/*, multipart/form-data. Content-Type: application/json

Returns the image metadata as JSON:

{
  "width": 550,
  "height": 740,
  "type": "jpeg",
  "space": "srgb",
  "hasAlpha": false,
  "hasProfile": true,
  "channels": 3,
  "orientation": 1
}