Image Placeholder for your development environment

13 November 2018 — Published originally on blog.arkency.com

Image Placeholder for your development environment

Some time ago I was working together with Paweł on one of our clients web application. We used copy of products catalog coming from production server on our development machines. What we were lacking were product photos, causing application layout to look poorly and making any css job hard. We tried to find a smart solution for that case.

Every time you request non-existing image in your app, you got a 404. What if we could detect such case and modify response to actually contain image and return 200 OK? Custom rack middleware is a perfect place for that. The code is pretty simple:

require 'net/http'

module ImagePlaceholder
  class Middleware
    def initialize(app, image_extensions: %w(jpg png), size_pattern: {/.*/ => 100}, host: 'via.placeholder.com')
      @app = app
      @image_extensions = image_extensions
      @size_pattern = size_pattern
      @host = host
    end

    def call(env)
      status, headers, response = @app.call(env)
      request_path = URI.decode(Rack::Request.new(env).fullpath)

      if not_found?(status) && image?(request_path)
        serve_placeholder_image(matched_size(request_path))
      else
        [status, headers, response]
      end
    end

    private

    def serve_placeholder_image(size = 100)
      net_response  = Net::HTTP.get_response(URI("https://#{@host}/#{size}"))
      rack_response = Rack::Response.new(net_response.body, net_response.code.to_i)
      safe_headers  = net_response.to_hash
                        .reject { |key, _| hop_by_hop_header_fields.include?(key.downcase) }
                        .reject { |key, _| key.downcase == 'content-length' }

      safe_headers.each do |key, values|
        values.each do |value|
          rack_response.add_header(key, value)
        end
      end
      rack_response.finish
    end

    def hop_by_hop_header_fields
      # https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-httpbis-p1-messaging-14#section-7.1.3.1
      %w(connection keep-alive proxy-authenticate proxy-authorization te trailer transfer-encoding upgrade)
    end

    def not_found?(status)
      status == 404
    end

    def image?(path)
      @image_extensions.include? File.extname(path)[1, 3]
    end

    def matched_size(path)
      @size_pattern.find { |pattern, _| pattern.match(path) }[1]
    end
  end
end

Check whether image is requested
Check if status is 404
If yes, make a get request to a service like placeholder.com and modify response with image from it
Otherwise, just return standard response

Our initial version used Fill Murray which brought us smile every time we launched products catalog to do some work on.

You can go with Steven Seagal eating a carrot or Nicolas Cage if you would like to. Just add host option to middleware use:

# config/environments/development.rb

Rails.application.configure do
  config.middleware.use ImagePlaceholder::Middleware, host: 'fillmurray.com'
end

You can also match desired image sizes, providing pattern:

# config/environments/development.rb

Rails.application.configure do
  config.middleware.use ImagePlaceholder::Middleware, size_pattern: {
    %r{/uploads/.*/s_[0-9]+\.[a-z]{3}$}  => 200,  # /uploads/product/cover/42/s_9781467775687.jpg
    %r{/uploads/.*/xl_[0-9]+\.[a-z]{3}$} => 750,  # /uploads/product/cover/42/xl_9781467775687.jpg
    %r{.*} => 1024,                               # /uploads/random/spanish_inquisition.png
  }
end

By default, ImagePlaceholde::Middleware supports .jpg and .png images, but you can extend supported filetypes with ease:

# config/environments/development.rb

Rails.application.configure do
  config.middleware.use ImagePlaceholder::Middleware, image_extensions: %w(jpg jpeg png webp gif)
end

And last, but not least, it can be used with any Rack application:

# config.ru
use ImagePlaceholder::Middleware, size_pattern: { /.*/ => '320/320' }, host: 'fillmurray.com'
run YourRackApp

To start using it, put gem image_placeholder into your Gemfile. If you would like to contribute or read more, visit https://github.com/arkency/image_placeholder

Enjoy!