pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
5b2fe03ffd
watches a folder and converts what lands in it, so a photo uploaded from a phone is
immediately something a browser can show and a thumbnail can be made from.
configurable, which is the point: watch_dir, extensions, output_format, lossless,
delete_source. only watch_dir has no default, so it is the only thing that blocks
arming.
IT CALLS av-club RATHER THAN ffmpeg OR sharp. everything that makes a conversion
safe lives behind that API, and a watcher shelling out itself would have none of it.
it also breaks the usual commander shape deliberately, and says so. the standard is
"wait, then spawn a headless agent to exercise judgement" — but there is no
judgement in "a HEIC arrived and needs converting", and an agent per photograph
costs real money to reach the same answer every time. so the loop calls the API
directly and only involves an agent when something goes wrong.
three things in the watcher that are not obvious and each cost somebody an
afternoon somewhere:
close_write and moved_to, never create — `create` fires when a file is opened for
writing, before it has any bytes
two identical size readings before touching a file — a file still being copied in
converts to a truncated result and gets marked done
a failure is recorded as SEEN — the same file fails identically every tick, and a
watcher retrying forever is the failure mode that costs money. it is in the log
and the owner can clear the line.
the brief tells it to offer the Convert Image task for the BACKLOG before arming
anything. a watcher only sees what arrives, and one armed over a quiet folder looks
broken while working perfectly.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
av-club
Turning whatever someone uploads into assets a website can actually serve.
People upload photos and videos straight off a phone or a camera: a 12 MB HEIC, a 4K clip in a codec Safari refuses to play, a JPEG carrying the GPS coordinates of the room it was shot in. None of that belongs on a page as-is. This is the thing in between.
It is an HTTP service that exposes as much of sharp, ffmpeg and ffprobe as can be exposed safely, keeping each tool's own vocabulary — sharp operations are named what sharp names them, ffprobe fields come back spelled the way ffprobe spells them. If you know the tool, you know the API.
What it will not let you do is name a file. That single restriction is what makes the rest safe to
open up; see docs/SECURITY.md.
Status
Assets, probing and the full sharp surface work. ffmpeg is designed but not built — that is the next piece.
docs/API.md |
The HTTP surface — start here if you are calling it |
docs/SHARP.md |
Every sharp operation and its bounds. Generated from the validator, so it cannot drift |
docs/SECURITY.md |
The threat model and the invariants. Read before adding an endpoint |
docs/TOOLING.md |
What is installed, and the two things that bite |
docs/PIPELINE.md |
What this is for, and what is still undecided |
Quick start
./scripts/install.sh # system packages + bun deps, then verifies
cp .env.example .env # then set AV_CLUB_TOKEN
bun dev
Verified on Ubuntu 24.04. The installer says so rather than guessing if it finds something else.
# upload something, then resize it
curl -X POST localhost:3020/v1/assets -H "Authorization: Bearer $AV_CLUB_TOKEN" -F file=@photo.jpg
curl -X POST localhost:3020/v1/sharp -H "Authorization: Bearer $AV_CLUB_TOKEN" \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' -d '{
"input": "as_…",
"pipeline": [{ "rotate": {} }, { "resize": { "width": 1200, "withoutEnlargement": true } }],
"output": { "format": "avif", "options": { "quality": 55 } }
}'
bun run verify checks the tooling; bun run docs regenerates docs/SHARP.md from the validator.
Why this is its own repo
It has system dependencies a web app should not have to assume. ffmpeg, ImageMagick, libvips and
exiftool are a real installation, not an npm install. Keeping them here means a consuming project
can state that it needs this, rather than quietly failing on a machine that happens not to have
ffprobe on its PATH.
It changes on a different clock. Encoder settings, derivative sizes and format choices get revisited as browser support moves. Page templates and database schemas do not.
Nothing about it is specific to one site. Resizing an image and extracting a poster frame are the same problem everywhere, which is why this is not buried inside the project that first needed it.
Its first consumer
fofos/platform — a website with a public site, an admin, and a database. Admins upload media
through the admin; this processes it; the platform stores what comes back.
How that handoff works is not decided yet. The honest options are a library the platform imports,
a CLI it shells out to, or a service it talks to. Each has real consequences for deployment and for
whether processing blocks an admin's upload while they wait. That question is written down in
docs/PIPELINE.md as open, rather than being answered by whatever happens to get built first.
Working agreements
- Commit and push every turn that changes anything — working, broken, or half-finished. The history is the artifact; it is how decisions stay traceable and mistakes stay learnable.
- Docs are live documents, and the code is the source of truth. Docs move with the code in the same commit. A doc contradicting the code is a bug in the doc.
- Direction changes fast, and that is expected. Nothing written here is frozen.