A tiny RESTful service for uploading pictures and other media.

git clone git://github.com/educoder/Pikachu.git
cd Pikachu
npm install
node app.js

Pikachu should now be running on http://localhost:2596.

Deploying on a server isn't much different from local deployment. The main difference is to ensure that Pikachu is automatically started on server start and restart should it crash.

For node.js you can use [forever] (https://github.com/foreverjs/forever), [supervisor] (http://supervisord.org/) or [PM2] (https://github.com/Unitech/PM2). The goal is to have a monitor that starts the node.js based app and keeps it running. Then you use Apache2 or Nginx as a reverse proxy to direct web traffic to the node.js app. At Encore Lab we used forever and then quickly switched to forever.

Another elegant solution is to use [Phussion Passenger] (https://www.phusionpassenger.com/) to run node, Rack and Python based applications. Passenger can run stand alone and offers plugins for Apache2 and Nginx. The major benefit of passenger as a plugin is that any Passenger based app will run when the webserver runs.

If you deploy Pikachu with Passenger on Nginx, the pictures are servered by nginx directly from the public folder without involving passenger nor Pikachu. Serving static content via nginx should improve the performance of Pikachu since nginx deals very well with static content and employs caching strategies to be very efficient.

More details on how to install will follow.

See http://localhost:2596/upload.html for an example of how to upload to Pikachu using HTML + AJAX.

All files are uploaded to Pikachu's public directory. Any file in public is automatically served at http://localhost:2596. For example public/1234.gif would be accessible at http://localhost:2596/1234.gif.

Pikachu's REST API is as follows:

Responds with a JSON array listing all files in public.

For example:

[
  "14o241fsc8w.jpg",
  "8q5u9haf40.jpg",
  "qri7bl5clc.jpg"
]

Uploads a new file to the public directory. Expects a multipart/form-data request (i.e. an HTML form submission or JavaScript FormData) with a key (name) of file.

Responds with JSON. If the upload fails, you'll get a 5xx or 4xx status code and an error object like:

{
  "errno":3,
  "code":"EACCES",
  "path":"/tmp/3b328623fa95f311a3389df247eaa164.jpg"
}

If it succeeds, you'll get a 2xx status code and a body with something like:

{
  "url":"2fr2ursgglc.jpg",
  "size":31511,
  "type":"image/jpeg"
}

See https://github.com/educoder/Pikachu/blob/master/upload.html for a JavaScript example.

Responds with the contents of the given filename.

For example, GET /14o241fsc8w.jpg would respond with the contents of the public/14o241fsc8w.jpg file. The response's MIME type is automatically resolved based on the file's extension.