How to use Lorem.space for generating random image placeholders with your local images

Lorem.space is an online API to generate categorized random image placeholders with custom sizes for your design layout.

What the hell is that?

Consider that you want to design a movie website or app, instead of downloading a bunch of movie covers, resizing them, and using them statically, you only set an URL (like https://api.lorem.space/image/movie?w=150&h=220) and each time a random movie cover will return.

To use API you can simply send a request to `https://api.lorem.space/image/movie?w=150&h=220`. This will return a random movie cover image in 150x220px dimensions. Some other categories like the game cover, music cover, store items, … are available and you can check https://lorem.space for more information.

How to run Lorem.space on your local machine

Lorem.space is an open-sourced program, you can download and run both frontend and backend apps on your local machine.

Run the server from binaries

1. Download the latest binary for your operating system: https://github.com/manasky/lorem-server/releases
2. Extract the downloaded file
3. Open Terminal (for macOS or Linux) and CMD (for windows) and navigate to the extracted folder.
4. Make sure the file is executable (grant permissions if needed)
5. Run the server with these commands:

Run the server from source code

Lorem.space server is written in Golang and you can access the source code from here: https://github.com/manasky/lorem-server

To run the server from codes, follow these steps:

1. Install Go: https://golang.org/dl/
2. Clone the repository: `git clone https://github.com/manasky/lorem-server.git`
3. Go to the directory of source code, create a new directory named `images` and put your images (.JPEG format) here. Each directory in `images` is considered as a category. for example, you can create a directory named `car` and put all cars’ images there.
4. Open Terminal (for macOS and Linux) or CMD (for Windows), then `cd` to the directory of source codes and run: `go run main.go`
5. Now the server is running on `127.0.0.1:8080`. Open `http://127.0.0.1:8080/image` in your browser and a random image from the `images` directory is returned.

Options

Some arguments are available to run the server:

• `host`: The IP and port of the server host
• `dir`: The address of the images directory
• `cache`: Enables file caching to prevent resizing the image in the same request
• `cdn`: CDN domain
• `min-width`: minimum supported width size in px
• `max-width`: maximum supported width size in px
• `min-height`: minimum supported height size in px
• `max-height`: maximum supported height size in px

Run the server with Docker

A built docker image of the Lorem server is available. You can pull the image by this command:
`docker pull ghcr.io/manasky/lorem-server:latest`

To run the docker image, you need to create a `.env` file containing the server configs:

Then in the directory of `.env` run this command in terminal:

• ` — env-file` sets the application environment variables path. Here `.env` file exists in the current path.
• `-p 8080:8080` sets up a port forward. the application container will listen to the `8080` port (set in the .env file as HOST). This flag maps the container’s port `8080` to port `8080` on the host (here, your localhost).
• `~/Pictures:/app/images` sets up a bind-mount volume that links the directory `/app/images` from inside the app container to the directory `~/Pictures` on the host machine (here, your system). The app image directory is set in the `.env` file as `/app/images`, so here the `~/Pictures` is mounted to that.

After container running, the app will scan `/app/images` which is mounted to the directory `~/Pictures` of your system & serves the HTTP server on 127.0.0.1:8080. Visit `127.0.0.1:8080/image` for start.

Contribute

Feels free to contribute to the repository or file an issue for feedback or bug reporting in Github.