Constable

Seascape Study with Rain Cloud was painted by John Constable around 1824.

Constable the Gem is a way of providing ImageMagick as a service. I doubt anything quite as powerful will be generated using the service, but if you do make something nice please let me know!

Up and running fast

I've provided a Vagrant setup that will get you up and running fast. Install the necessary gems using bundler:

$ cd /path/to/checkout/of/constable
$ bundle

Ask Vagrant to bring up the server components for you:

$ cd /path/to/checkout/of/constable
$ bundle exec vagrant up

Ask Constable to do some work:

$ cd /path/to/checkout/of/constable
$ bundle exec ./bin/constable-identify -- /path/to/input.png -verbose

That's it, you just used ImageMagick as a service.

Of course, if you want to use it as a real service on your network you'll probably want to set it up a little differently. See the following sections on Installing and Usage for information on how to setup your own ImageMagick service.

Installing

The server needs ImageMagick installed. Mostly I do this using apt-get:

$ apt-get install imagemagick

You'll need a broker that talks Stomp somewhere on your network. I use Apache Apollo, and I'm not totally sure if the code uses anything that's specific to that. I'd love it to be broker-agnostic though, so if you have patches that'll bring this closer to reality please send them to me!

Usage

ImageMagick provides a huge number of commands and options. Supporting them all is a big task, so I'm implementing just the few that I use. If you need something else supported, please do fork and patch the project. Let me know and I'll pull your changes.

Run the server, somewhere that has ImageMagick installed:

$ constabled --broker=stomp://mq.yourdomain.com:61613

Use the services on the command line. You don't need to have ImageMagick installed on your client machines, just constable.

Command names are based on ImageMagick command names, prefixed with constable-, eg constable-identify. All commands will respond to --help and will give you a decent explanation of what they do and their options if you ask for it.

The commands are designed to take their input just like ImageMagick and return results on standard output. It's up to you what you do with the output; write it to a file, pipe it to another process, that's not handled by Constable. A caveat of this is that you must construct your Constable invocations such that ImageMagick would write to standard output rather than a file.

A brief example of what interacting with Constable looks like, here identifying some image file I had lying around on disk:

$ constable-identify --broker=stomp://mq.yourdomain.com:61613 -- input_file
input_file JPEG 640x480 DirectClass 87kb 0.050u 0:01

$ constable-convert --broker=stomp://mq.yourdomain.com:61613 -- \
  -resize 50% input.png jpg:- > output.jpg

I explicitly state the broker in the above commands but if you leave out that option it'll default to stomp://localhost:61613 ie it expects a broker running on your local machine if you don't tell it otherwise.

Authors

Craig R Webster http://barkingiguana.com/