pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
bd8b7b9ad4
adds a path mode to /v1/ffmpeg:
{ input: "as_…" } → stored as a new asset, 201
{ inputPath: "/…", outputPath: "/…" } → written where you said, 200 { path, bytes }
THIS REVISES THE INVARIANT IN docs/SECURITY.md, deliberately, and that document now
says so at the top rather than being quietly contradicted by the code.
it used to read "the caller never supplies a path, for input or output". that was
right for an upload service and av-club is not one: both of its real consumers —
a right-click on ~/Movies/thing.mkv, and a commander watching an upload folder —
already have the file, and obeying the rule meant copying gigabytes in and back out
to convert something that never moved. a rule that expensive gets worked around,
and the workaround is where the hole would have been.
so it is narrower now and says what it was always for. argv never a shell,
-protocol_whitelist file, filters allowlisted, work bounded — all unchanged. what
is gone is only the claim that a path never appears, replaced by one small module
every path goes through:
absolute (a relative path resolves against a cwd the caller cannot see)
realpath FIRST, then check — checking the path as written and opening the
resolved one is the classic way this fails
inside as `root` or `root + sep`, never a bare startsWith, which accepts
/home/user-backup for a root of /home/user
for an output the PARENT is resolved, and must already exist
errors never say which of "outside" or "missing" it was, or this becomes an
oracle for what exists elsewhere on the disk
VERIFIED against the running service, not reasoned about: `..` traversal, an
absolute path outside the root, a write outside the root, a relative path, a
symlink pointing into /etc, and a write THROUGH a symlinked directory — all
refused, nothing written outside the root.
the output is moved into place at the END. ffmpeg encodes into a temp dir, so a job
killed by the timeout or a restart leaves the caller's directory as it was. pointing
ffmpeg at the destination would leave a truncated file where a good one might have
been — and a task that then deleted its source would have destroyed something.
rename first, copy on EXDEV, which is the normal case rather than the error one
since tmp is often tmpfs.
docs/API.md said this endpoint was "designed, not yet built" while it was routed and
working. that is fixed too: it was read as a gap and nearly rebuilt.
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.