heroku-buildpack-vips

Disclaimer

If you don't need the vips binary, and you also don't need the latest version of vips, you might not need this buildpack. Take a look here at the versions that are now included in the Heroku stacks by default.

There are some known security issues with using outdated versions, see this issue comment for more information.

Important changes

As of August, 2023, this buildpack switched from using poppler as a PDF loader to pdfium.

About this buildpack

A VIPS buildpack for the modern Heroku stacks. This stack supports the following stacks:

• heroku-20
• heroku-22

If you have problems on any of these stacks, or if a new stack comes out that is unsupported, please file an issue.

If you would like to use a build for a deprecated stack, the last versions which supported deprecated stacks are tagged with the stack name.

Important notes:

This buildpack started out as one of the many that are out there, and ended up being completely different. The build script uses docker and also includes pdf support via pdfium. In order to use this buildpack, you must install these packages in your heroku application:

• libglib2.0-0
• libglib2.0-dev

Additionally, if you are planning to use sharp, you may also need the following packages:

• libheif-dev
• libfftw3-dev
• libwebp-dev

The easiest way to do this is using the heroku apt buildpack.

This buildpack was put together with the help of John Cupitt, the creator of libvips. He was invaluable in my efforts to get a working libvips installation with pdf support on heroku. Thank you John!

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Heroku buildpack with libvips installed.

Usage

To use this on Heroku it must be installed with the required dependencies in the required order. We must first add the apt buildpack so that it is executed first. We can do that with the following Heroku CLI command:

heroku buildpacks:add --index 1 https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-apt

Once added, you'll need to make sure that you create a file called Aptfile in the root of your project. The contents of this file need to be:

libglib2.0-0
libglib2.0-dev

These are dependencies required for this buildpack.

We can then add this buildpack by running:

heroku buildpacks:add --index 2 https://github.com/brandoncc/heroku-buildpack-vips

After running this command you should see the output similar to:

Buildpack added. Next release on amazing-earthfest will use:
  1. heroku-community/apt
  2. https://github.com/brandoncc/heroku-buildpack-vips
  3. heroku/ruby

The order is important as the apt buildpack and its dependencies must be installed before this buildpack. Finally the buildpack specifc to your application (in this case its the ruby buildpack) can be installed.

Build script

This is the script used to build vips using docker.

VIPS_VERSION=x.y.z ./build.sh

After building a tar file, it will be copied to the build directory. Then you should commit this changes to git.

Build configurations

If you would like to see the output of vips --vips-version or vips --vips-config, both can be found for each stack in the build/configurations directory. These configuration logs are generated automatically during the build process, so they should always be up-to-date.