bristermitten / imagecompressor

A tiny Node service I use to compress any screenshots

ImageCompressor

ImageCompressor is a tiny Node service I use to compress any screenshots uploaded to my server.

It is a simple CLI that watches a directory for any new image files, and compresses them if applicable.

ImageCompressor supports 4 main file types:

1. PNG
2. JPEG
3. SVG
4. GIF

and uses compress-images to handle image compression.

Functionality

ImageCompressor was built with a specific requirement set: Watch a directory for new images that will be uploaded via SFTP, and compress them automatically

From testing, this is achieved well. Checks are done to respect the updating of files as they upload, and the tool performs well, with absolutely no blocking code (all work is done asynchronously via callbacks).

Images are compressed effectively, with an average size reduction of ~60% (although this is not an achievement of ImageCompressor, moreso the compression tools made by talented developers)

ImageCompressor is also lightweight, with very few NPM dependencies.

Usage

Using ImageCompressor is trivial:

npm start - starts ImageCompressor watching the working directory

npm start --directory=/some/dir/here - Starts ImageCompressor watching a given directory

npm run debug [--directory] - Starts ImageCompressor in debug mode. More logging info will be given.

Directories

ImageCompressor uses 3 main directories:

1. The watched directory. This defaults to the working directory or can be specified as shown above.
2. The logs directory. All logs are piped to here via the start script, into either info.log or error.log. Pino is used for pretty log messages (however colours may not display properly in a file).
3. The .build directory. This is a hidden directory used to store compressed copies of images. Once compression completes, these copies are removed.

Future Plans and Feedback

• Store uncompressed images?
• Improve the logging, writing to both a file and stdout
• Clean up the code, split into separate files, etc

I am not overly familiar with JavaScript and Node, so some conventions may have been broken here. Feedback is appreciated and any PRs are very welcome!