Cabin – React & Redux Example App – imgix

This is the 5th post for Cabin, the React & Redux Example App Tutorial series created by Stream. The final result of following this series is your own feature-rich, scalable social network app built with React and Redux!

Visit cabin.getstream.io for an overview of all the tutorials, as well as a live demo. The full source code is available on GitHub.

Introduction

For our image hosting and real-time processing – we are using imgix to serve our photo uploads, and manipulate them on the fly.

As the imgix website states, “This is not ImageMagick running on EC2. This is way better.”

Indeed. Choosing imgix is choosing an easy way to adding ultra fast image rendering, CDN hosting, as well as intelligent caching. Nice. Companies like Zillow, Kickstarter, Eventbrite, and Lyft are using imgix – and it’s incredibly easy for you to do so as well. It was breeze for us to implement in our React app. Follow along with me to see how easy it is to implement imgix in your application.

Overview

Here is what you will be learning in this post of the series:

Getting Set Up

Let’s go through the simple steps of getting set up with imgix.

First things first: Go ahead and sign up for an imgix account.

Next, create a Source.

A Source is a place where your images will be uploaded initially. Your Source could be a web folder, but in this case, we are going to go with Amazon S3. For information on setting up AWS and an S3 bucket – click here.

Finish up by adding your AWS credentials and S3 information – more information here.

Server Side

Have a look at the api/config.js:

Since we’re uploading to S3 and not imgix directly, you will simply see an object for your S3 credentials. The cool thing is, imgix will keep in sync with our S3 bucket.

s3: {
        key: [S3 Key],
        secret: [S3 Secret],
        bucket: 'stream-cabin',
    },

Photo Upload Process

Our photo upload process looks like:

– Upload to Amazon S3 via the knox client
– Add geocode information with the help of Mapbox
– Insert the information into our MySQL database
– Add to Algolia Search index
– Push to the appropriate Stream feeds

Take a look at the code for the S3 upload via knox – in api/routes/uploads.js file:

// async waterfall (see: https://github.com/caolan/async)
    async.waterfall([

        // upload file to amazon s3
        function(cb) {

            // initialize knox client
            var knoxClient = knox.createClient({
                key: config.s3.key,
                secret: config.s3.secret,
                bucket: config.s3.bucket
            });

            // send put via knox
            knoxClient.putFile(file.image.path, 'uploads/' + data.filename, {
                'Content-Type': file.image.type,
                'x-amz-acl': 'public-read'
            }, function(err, result) {

                if (err || result.statusCode != 200) {
                    cb(err);
                }

                cb(null);

            });

        },

And that’s the only code we need to handle our imgix integration on the server. imgix will handle the rest – keeping in sync with our S3 bucket.

Client Side

If you thought our server-side setup was simple – it’s even easier on the client. Our image manipulation happens right in our image src tag inside of a React component.

Before we take a dive into the React component, let’s look at the app/config.js:

imgix: {
        baseUrl: 'https://react-example-app.imgix.net/uploads',
    },

In the case of imgix, we aren’t adding any API keys – just the base URL we will be referencing in our PhotoItem React component. If you don’t know your base URL – check it out on your Source page.

Take a look at app/modules/components/PhotoList/PhotoItem.js:

class PhotoItem extends Component {

    render() {
        return (
            <li>
                <Link to={`/photos/${this.props.id}`}>
                    <img src={`${config.imgix.baseUrl}/${this.props.filename}?auto=enhance&w=200&h=200&fit=crop&fm=png&dpr=2`} className="full-width" />
                </Link>
                <PhotoFooter {...this.props} onLike={this.props.onLike} />
            </li>
        )
    }
}

Image Adjustments

One awesome thing about imgix is the Image API. As you can see from the code in the section above, we are making our image adjustments through the URL-based API:

?auto=enhance&w=200&h=200&fit=crop&fm=png&dpr=2

Let’s break this down, feature-by-feature:

The auto parameter allows imgix to make certain types of adjustments and optimizations automatically.

enhance
When auto is set to enhance, the image is adjusted using the distribution of highlights, midtones, and shadows across all three channels—red, green, and blue (RGB). Overall, the enhancement gives images a more vibrant appearance.

w=200

Sets the width to 200 pixels. You can also set size to a proportion of the original by using a range between 0.0 and 1.0.

h=200

Sets the height to 200 pixels. You can also set size to a proportion of the original by using a range between 0.0 and 1.0.

The fit parameter controls how the output image is fit to its target dimensions.

clip

Resizes the image to fit within the width and height boundaries without cropping or distorting the image.

The fm output format to convert the image to. Valid options are gif, jp2, jpg, json, jxr, pjpg, mp4, png, png8, png32, and webp.

Control the output density of your image.

The device pixel ratio (dpr) is used to easily convert between device independent pixels and device pixels. This makes it possible to display images at the correct pixel density on a variety of devices such as Apple Retina displays and Android devices. You must specify a width, a height, or both for this parameter to work. The default is 1. The maximum value that can be set for dpr is 8.

More Awesome Image API Features

Imgix has a variety of functionality you can add to your app – that goes way beyond what we have done so far.

Instagram-Like Filters

Want to incorporate Instagram-like filters into your application? It’s as easy as making any image adjustment. Check out this great tutorial on dynamically blending images.

Go ahead and open up the imgix Image API documentation to see what other cool things can be do on-the-fly with imgix. Need more convincing? Check out this case study.

Conclusion

Using imgix, we were able to setup an advanced image resizing and processing micro service in just a few hours. In the next post we’ll cover how we’re using Keen to add custom stats to Cabin.

Sign Up For Updates, Win A Sweet Hoodie

If you haven’t already – sign up to receive updates of this series. By signing up, you will receive updates on forthcoming posts as well as tips, and bonus materials. You will also be entered to win a Stream hoodie:

Also – be sure to sign up for a Stream account. You will double your chances to win a sweet hoodie.

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