next-plugin-imagegen

A next.js plugin turns jsx components as image.

Introduction

⚠️ Still in experiment! Use it in production with caution!

This plugin gives you ability to create image with next.js primitives (jsx/css), and serve images with routes. Any url query will be passed as props to the component to create any dynamic image. The generated image are cached to serve fast and in good quality.

For example, create ./pages/<path>.image.js in your next.js projects

import styles from './styles.module.css'

export default function render({name}) {
  return <div className={styles.root}>Logo {name}</div>
}

Accessing /logo.image?name=hello will return a image as the snapshot of the component.

Install

yarn add next-plugin-imagegen

Usage

Basic usage

Edit next.config.js

const { withImagegen } = require('next-plugin-imagegen')

module.exports = withImagegen({/* next.js config */})

Edit ./pages/api/imagegen/[...imagegen].js

import { handler, provider } from 'next-plugin-imagegen'

export default handler(provider())

By default, imagegen plugin will use Microlink as default provider for snapshotting. This requires you to expose your network to the internet to make your endpoint accessible by microlink services. For example you can use ngrok to expose your localhost to web and visit the provided url for development.

Visit route /<path>.image.snapshot to access the original rendered html page for image components.

Advanced usage

To override the available microlink provider options, checkout microlink options for details.

import { handler, provider } from 'next-plugin-imagegen'

export default handler(
  provider({
    // Available options
    colorScheme: 'no-preference',
    viewport: { /* ... */ },
    
    // microlink PRO plan options
    apiKey: 'microlink api key',
    headers: { /* ... */ },
    ttl: 'max',
  })
)

Microlink options of pro plan

• apiKey: API token for microlink. Configure this option or just pass MICROLINK_TOKEN through env variable.
• ttl: the maximum quantity of time a resource served from cache layer is considered as valid. microlink parameters/ttl
• headers: custom HTTP header to be passed along over the url. microlink parameters/headers

For rest options listed below, checkout browserless API docs for details of other options.

• type
• viewport
• colorScheme
• omitBackground

Other Providers

If you want to use other provider, like puppeteer, just do:

yarn add next-plugin-imagegen next-plugin-imagegen-puppeteer

Specific puppeteer provider in ./pages/api/imagegen/[...imagegen].js

import { handler } from 'next-plugin-imagegen'
import { provider } from 'next-plugin-imagegen-puppeteer'


export default handler(
  provider({
    // Available options
    headers: { /* ... */ },
    viewport: {/* ... */ },
    colorScheme: 'no-preference',
    type: 'png',
    omitBackground: false,
    ttl: 31536000,
  })
)

• ttl: the maximum amount of time a resource is considered fresh, seconds in integer, 0 by default.
• colorScheme: value of prefers-color-scheme

puppeteer options

• headers
• type
• viewport
• omitBackground

Local Development

You can also specify puppeteer provider for local development, and default provider (microlink) for production.

Edit ./pages/api/imagegen/[...imagegen].js

import { handler, provider as defaultProvider } from 'next-plugin-imagegen'
import { provider } from 'next-plugin-imagegen-puppeteer'

export default handler(
  process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production' ? defaultProvider() : provider()
)

How It Works

Imagegen plugin proxies your image component routes, and setup a handler at the same time to snapshot your original image component HTML and send back to user end.