I am building a MEAN application (Angular + node + Express + Mongo).
In this app there are users who can upload a limited amount of pictures (lets say 5).
I really want to avoird storing too many data on my server.
So I am looking for a module that let users upload the images to a service such as picasa, imageshack... The service should be transparent to the user.
When it's done, I save the picture URL in my DB and so I can retrieve it and display pictures easily.
Do you know such module / tutorial to do that? Does it even exists?
I have been looking but it seems to not exists.
The easiest way to have a file upload service with AngularJS as the front end and NodeJS as the backend is to use the jQuery File Upload for use with AngularJS, which can be found here.
It makes use of a directive that you can use to upload your file.
You need to specify a route to which the uploaded file should be POST'ed to.
In this route handle, that is in you Node.js server, you can then post it to the external image hosting servers. This is something that you can write on your own or you can use the node.js modules for the respective hosts (if they exist).
I find a service doing it:
http://cloudinary.com/
With a nodejs integration:
http://cloudinary.com/documentation/node_integration
It seems perfect (free up to 500 MO and 50.000 pictures, far enough for my needs).
Related
I've been working on the front-end so far, now I'm going to create my first full-stack application. I want to use node.js, express and AWS for this.
At the design stage, I already encountered a few problems. Therefore, I have a few questions and I am asking you for help:
Can I send a message (simple JSON or database value) from the server to all clients who have already opened my home page in a simple and cheap way?
I'm not talking about logged in users, but all who downloaded the main page (GET, '/')?
Using the admin panel ('www.xxxxxxxxx/admin'), I want to send a message to the server once a day. Then I want to change the HTML to display this message. I was thinking to use EJS for this and download this message from the database.
Can I make it better? If someone visits my home page (GET, '/'), EJS will download the message from the database each time! Even though its value is the same for 24 hours. Can I get the value once and then use it until the value is changed? How to store the message? As a JSON on the server? Or maybe in the .env file?
If the user refreshes the page, do I have to pay for calling all AWS functions to build the page each time? Even if nothing has changed in the files?
How to check if the page has new content and then send it to the user, instead of sending the unchanged page files: .html, .js, .css, etc.?
Can I send the user only the changed, dynamically created html file, and not send again unchanged .js and .css files?
Does every user who opens the home page (GET, '/') create a new connection to the server using WebSocket / socket.io?
I will try to answer some of your questions:
Can I send a message (simple JSON or database value) from the server to all clients who have already opened my home page in a simple
and cheap way? I'm not talking about logged in users, but all who
downloaded the main page (GET, '/')?
I guess you mean sending push notifications from the server to the user. This can be done with different services depending on what are you trying to build.
If you are planning to use GraphQL, you already have GraphQL subscriptions out of the box. If you are using AWS, go for Appsync, which is the AWS service for GraphQL.
If you are using REST and a WebApp (not a mobile app), go for AWS IoT using lambdas. Here is a good resource using Serverless Framework (API Gateway + lambdas + IoT) for unauthenticated users: https://www.serverless.com/blog/serverless-notifications-on-aws
If you are planning to use notifications on a mobile app, you can go for SNS, the "de facto" service for push notifications in AWS world.
Using the admin panel ('www.xxxxxxxxx/admin'), I want to send a message to the server once a day. Then I want to change the HTML to display this message. I was thinking to use EJS for this and download this message from the database. Can I make it better? If someone visits my home page (GET, '/'), EJS will download the message from the database each time! Even though its value is the same for 24 hours. Can I get the value once and then use it until the value is changed? How to store the message? As a JSON on the server? Or maybe in the .env file?
Yes, this is the way it's expected to work. The HTML is changed dynamically using frontend code in Javascript; which makes calls (using axios for example) to the backend every time you get into, i.e. "/" path. You can store this data in frontend variables, or even use state management in the frontend using REDUX, VUEX, etc. Remember the frontend code will always run in the browser of your users, not on your servers!
If the user refreshes the page, do I have to pay for calling all AWS functions to build the page each time? Even if nothing has changed in the files?
What you can do is store all your HTML, CSS, Javascript in an S3 bucket and serve from there (this is super cheap, even free till a certain limit). If you want to use Server Side Rendering (SSR), then yes, you'll need to serve your users every time they make a GET request for example. If you use lambda, the first million request per month are free. If you have an EC2 instance to serve your content, then a t2.micro is also free. If you need more than that, you'll need to pay.
How to check if the page has new content and then send it to the user, instead of sending the unchanged page files: .html, .js, .css, etc.?
I think you need to understand how JS (or frameworks like React, Vue or Angular) do this. Basically you download the js code on the client, and the js makes all the functionality to update backend and frontend accordingly. In order to connect frontend with backend, use Axios for example.
Can I send the user only the changed, dynamically created html file, and not send again unchanged .js and .css files?
See answer above. Use frameworks like React or Vue, will help you a lot.
Does every user who opens the home page (GET, '/') create a new connection to the server using WebSocket / socket.io?
Depends on what you code. But by default what happens is the user will make a new GET request everytime he accesses your domain, and that's it. (It's not establishing any connection if you don't tell the code to do so).
Hope this helps!! Happy coding!
I have a MEVN Stack app. This requires to upload media files to the database. From the client-side, I am posting a multipart type form which will send the file to the server through Axios. I don't know how to store that in the MongoDB database and retrieve the same.
What you are looking for, is creating an API in node.js to handle uploaded file. (You can use express.js to make your life easier if you are not already using it)
In Vue.js create a component to upload a file and store the files in the file system on the server might be in a folder that is accessible through the web server (like in a public folder).
Finally, save the URL to access the file in MongoDB so, you can reference it later. You can google for tutorials on this, an example is here.
I would like to know what is the best way to handle image uploading and saving the reference to the database. What I'm mostly interested is what order do you do the process in?
Should you upload the images first in the front-end (say Cloudinary), and then call the API with result links to the images and save it to the database?
Or should you upload the images to the server first, and upload them from the back-end and save the reference afterwards?
OR, should you do the image uploading after you save the record in the database and then update it once the images were uploaded?
It really depends on the resources, timeline, and number of images you need to upload daily.
So basically if you have very few images to upload then you can upload that image to your server then upload it to any cloud storage(s3, Cloudinary,..) you are using. As this will be very easy to implement(you can find code snippet over the internet) and you can securely maintain your secret keys/credential to your cloud platform on the server side.
But, according to me best way of doing this will be something like this. I am taking user registration as an example
Make server call to get a temporary credential to upload files on the cloud(Generally, all the providers give this functionality i.e. STS/Signed URL in AWS).
The user will fill up the form and select the image on the client side. When the user clicks the submit button make one call to save the user in the database and start upload with credentials. If possible keep a predictable path for upload. Like for user upload /users/:userId or something like that. this highly depends on your use case.
Now when upload finishes make a server call for acknowledgment and store some flag in the database.
Now advantages of this approach are:
You are completely offloading your server from handling file operations which are pretty heavy and I/O blocking and you are distributing that load to all clients.
If you want to post process the files after upload you can easily integrate this with serverless platforms and do that on there and again offload that.
You can easily provide retry mechanism to your users in case of file upload fails but they won't need to refill the data, just upload the image/file again
You don't need to expose the URL directly to the client for file upload as you are using temporary Creds.
If the significance of the images in your app is high then ideally, you should not complete the transaction until the image is saved. The approach should be to create an object in your code which you will eventually insert into mongodb, start upload of image to cloud and then add the link to this object. Finally then insert this object into mongodb in one go. Do not make repeated calls. Anything before that, raise an error and catch the exception
You can have many answers,
if you are working with big files greater than 16mb please go with gridfs and multer,
( changing the images to a different format and save them to mongoDB)
If your files are actually less than 16 mb, please try using this Converter that changes the image of format jpeg / png to a format of saving to mongodb, and you can see this as an easy alternative for gridfs ,
please check this github repo for more details..
Sorry, It might be very novice problem but I am new to node and web apps and just have been stuck on this for couples of days.
I have been working with a API called "Face++" that requires user to upload images to detect faces. So basically users needed to upload images to my webapps backend and my backend would do an API request with that image. I somehow managed to upload the files at my node's backend using tutorial provided below but now I am struggling how to use those image files. I really don't know how to have access to those files. I thought writing just the filepath/filename would help but it did not. I am really new at webapps.
I used tutorial from here: https://coligo.io/building-ajax-file-uploader-with-node/
to upload my files at back-end.
thanks
You can also use the Face++ REST API node client
https://www.npmjs.com/package/faceppsdk
As per in documentation it requires a live URL on web. Then you have to upload your files into remote location (You may upload files to a Amazon S3 Bucket)
And also you check the sample codes from Documentation where you can upload directly to Face++
I'm currently considering developing a Meteor node.js app, but am struggling with how best to handle uploading of user images. In particular, I want to create a photography website that will allow the photographer to upload images in an 'admin' section, and these images will then be displayed on the website. I need to create a thumbnail of these images, and save the respective URLs to the database. I'm struggling with how to best accomplish this in meteor.
Is my best bet to use something like s3 combined with an AWS process for generating thumbnails?
Or should I save and host the images directly in the Meteor/node session?
Or should I scrap Meteor and use something like Express.js for this project?
Why don't you just use something like Filepicker.io to handle uploading and hosting images and simply store the image unique url (given to you by filepicker in the callback)?
Thumbnails can also be dynamically generated by Filepicker (using simple url modifications).
Cloudinary is a nicer alternative to filepicker when it comes to images, but integration process will be messier.
I would store the images on the filesystem, not in a database. If you have a unique id, you can use that as part of the url, for example an id of the item the image belongs to. Might look like this:
./uploads/img-<id>-<size>.jpg
You can write to disk and resize if necessary with node-imagemagick and your cdn should just poll these images from time to time. Not exactly sure how that part would work in terms of including the url to the image in the html.