Files
opencloud/services/thumbnails

Thumbnails

The thumbnails service is a stateless image resizer. It exposes an imagor-compatible push endpoint that accepts an original image as a multipart upload and returns the resized thumbnail encoded in the requested format.

Warning: This service performs no authentication or authorization. By default it binds to 127.0.0.1:9186 so only local processes (the webdav service) can reach it. If you change THUMBNAILS_HTTP_ADDR to a non-loopback address, put it behind your reverse proxy's auth layer or an internal network boundary — anyone who can reach the endpoint can upload and retrieve arbitrary images through it.

Push Endpoint

The webdav service (which owns the complete thumbnail workflow) POSTs the source file to this endpoint and receives the processed image back.

Route Description
POST /unsafe/{width}x{height} (optionally /filters:format({format})) Fill the exact width x height (center crop, may upscale) — the default
POST /unsafe/fit-in/{width}x{height} (optionally /filters:format({format})) Scale to fit within width x height, preserving aspect ratio and never upscaling (letterboxed)
POST /unsafe/stretch/{width}x{height} (optionally /filters:format({format})) Resize to the exact width x height without preserving aspect ratio (distorts)

The filters segment is captured whole and parsed; the format and no_upscale filters are meaningful to this executor, other filters are ignored. The format filter is optional: when absent the input's own format is preserved (detected from the image header), matching imagor. Inputs we cannot re-encode (e.g. webp, tiff, bmp) fall back to JPEG, mirroring imagor's default for unsavable sources.

Like real imagor, the default fill resize upscales small sources to fill the box exactly (a 100x100 source requested at 320x320 returns a 320x320 image). Adding the no_upscale() filter caps the result at the source size instead (the same request returns 100x100). The fit-in route never upscales regardless of filters.

The webdav service selects the route based on the requested processor. The full mapping is:

Request Operation
processor=resize stretch (distort to the exact box)
processor=fill or processor=thumbnail fill (center-crop to the exact box, may upscale)
processor=fit / processor=fit-in fit-in (preserve aspect, fit in box, never upscale)
no processor, gif source stretch (resize for gifs)
no processor, other sources fill (default = thumbnail = fill)

By default (no processor, non-gif) the fill form is used, which center-crops to the exact box and upscales small sources — this matches the legacy thumbnail processor behavior (e.g. a 200x100 image requested at 100x100 returns a square 100x100 image). Requesting processor=fit switches to the fit-in form, which preserves aspect ratio and never upscales, letterboxing a non-square source into the box (the same image returns 100x50).

Legacy a parameter

The webdav preview endpoint also accepts a legacy a flag: a=1 (or absent) means "preserve aspect" (fit-in), a=0 means "fill". An explicit processor always wins over a. When an explicit processor overrides a contradictory a, the thumbnail response includes the header X-OpenCloud-Thumbnail-Aspect-Ignored so developers can tell their client to send a consistent request.

The request body is a multipart/form-data upload with a single file field named image. Supported output formats are jpg, png, and gif.

Configuration

Environment variable Description
THUMBNAILS_HTTP_ADDR Bind address of the HTTP service (default 127.0.0.1:9186)
THUMBNAILS_LOG_LEVEL Log level (panic, fatal, error, warn, info, debug, trace)
THUMBNAILS_MAX_CONCURRENT_REQUESTS Maximum number of thumbnail requests decoded and resized in parallel. Default is 0 (unlimited). Requests arriving while the limit is reached get HTTP 429 with a Retry-After header

Using libvips for Image Processing

To improve performance and to support a wider range of image formats, the thumbnails service is able to utilize the libvips library for image processing. Support for libvips needs to be enabled at buildtime and has a couple of implications:

  • With libvips support enabled, it is not possible to create a statically linked OpenCloud binary.
  • Therefore, the libvips shared libraries need to be available at runtime in the same release that was used to build the OpenCloud binary.
  • When using the OpenCloud docker images, the libvips shared libraries are included in the image and are correctly embedded.

Support of libvips is disabled by default. To enable it, make sure libvips and its buildtime dependencies are installed in your build environment. For macOS users, add the build time dependencies via:

brew install vips pkg-config
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="/usr/local/opt/libffi/lib/pkgconfig"

Then you just need to set the ENABLE_VIPS variable on the make command:

make -C opencloud build ENABLE_VIPS=1

Or include the enable_vips build tag in the go build command:

go build -tags enable_vips -o opencloud -o bin/opencloud ./cmd/opencloud

When building a docker image using the Dockerfile in the top-level directory of OpenCloud, libvips support is enabled and the libvips shared libraries are included in the resulting docker image.