Placeholder image generator

Placeholder image services are useful, which means they get a lot of traffic. Lots of traffic means the service gets hammered, and chances are, when you need it, it will be down.

The solution? Run your own.

You can run this little Express app on your localhost, or on a server, giving you your own private service, akin to placehold.it or DummyImage.

Running the server

Clone this repo:

git clone git@github.com:bengourley/placeholder.git

Install the npm dependencies:

cd placeholder
npm install

Install GraphicsMagick. If you are on a Mac (If you are not on a Mac, sorry, I can't help!):

brew install graphicsmagick

Then finally, start the server with:

node app

By default it will listen on port 9999. You can change this by passing in the port as an environment variable:

PORT=1234 node app

Getting images

Construct a URL like so:

http:// [hostname]:[port]/[width]x[height] [format] [?query=params]

• hostname - If you are on your local machine, this will be localhost

• port - By default this is 9999. You will know if it is set to something else.

• width - The desired image width.

• height - The desired image height. If left off, the resulting image will be square: {width} x {width}.

• format - This can be .png, .jpg or .gif. It is optional and defaults to .png

• query - Further options can be specified here:

  color - must be a hex value without the #. Default is 'ccc'. textColor - must be a hex value without the #. Default is '000'. text - The text to display. Default is '{width} x {height}'.

Examples

• /400x500 gets you a 400x500 .png with black text and a grey background

• /480x360.jpg?text=Placeholder gets you a 480x360 .jpg displaying the text 'Placeholder'

• /500x100.png?color=000&textColor=fff gets you a .png with white text and a black background

• /250 gets you a 250x250 image

Author

Ben Gourley

Licence

Licenced under the New BSD License

View the source on GitHub