Generating and serving thumbnails efficiently in Rails apps is still a headache.

That’s why I built my own solution. It’s written in Go and uses libvips to process images. It’s fast, easy to integrate, you can deploy it with Kamal alongside your main app.

(I said Rails, but it’s a standalone web service, you can use it with Node, PHP, whatever)

Features:

• thumbnails generated on the fly
• smart crop
• signed urls
• cache with CDN
• 100% free and open source

Why write another image processing service?

• I didn’t like the existing ones
• I’m not a fan of how ActiveStorage works for this
• I wanted to learn Go

I’d love for you to try it. There’s a pre-built docker image and instructions on how to deploy it with Kamal.

https://github.com/pch/mediator/tree/main