Skip to content

creativecommons/og-image-generator

Repository files navigation

Open Graph Image Generator

Serverless service that generates dynamic Open Graph images that you can embed in your <meta> tags.

For each keystroke, headless chromium is used to render an HTML page and take a screenshot of the result which gets cached.

Code of conduct

CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md:

The Creative Commons team is committed to fostering a welcoming community. This project and all other Creative Commons open source projects are governed by our Code of Conduct. Please report unacceptable behavior to conduct@creativecommons.org per our reporting guidelines.

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md.

What is an Open Graph Image?

Have you ever posted a hyperlink to Twitter, Facebook, or Slack and seen an image popup? How did your social network know how to "unfurl" the URL and get an image? The answer is in your <head>.

The Open Graph protocol says you can put a <meta> tag in the <head> of a webpage to define this image.

It looks like the following:

<head>
  <title>Title</title>
  <meta
    property="og:image"
    content="https://cc-og-image.vercel.app/Hello%20World.png"
  />
</head>

Why use this service?

The short answer is that it would take a long time to painstakingly design an image for every single blog post and every single documentation page. And we don't want the exact same image for every blog post because that wouldn't make the article stand out when it was shared to Twitter.

That's where cc-og-image.vercel.app comes in. We can simply pass the title of our blog post to our generator service and it will generate the image for us on the fly!

It looks like the following:

<head>
  <title>Hello World</title>
  <meta
    property="og:image"
    content="https://cc-og-image.vercel.app/Hello%20World.png"
  />
</head>

Now try changing the text Hello%20World to the title of your choosing and watch the magic happen ✨

Deploy your own

You'll want to fork this repository and deploy your own image generator.

  1. Click the fork button at the top right of GitHub
  2. Clone the repo to your local machine with git clone URL_OF_FORKED_REPO_HERE
  3. Change directory with cd og-image
  4. Make changes by swapping out images, changing colors, etc (see contributing for more info)
  5. Hobby plan users will need to remove all configuration inside vercel.json besides rewrites
  6. Run locally with vercel dev and visit localhost:3000 (if nothing happens, run npm install -g vercel)
  7. Deploy to the cloud by running vercel and you'll get a unique URL
  8. Setup GitHub to autodeploy on push

If you are using a paid plan, you can do a one-click deploy with the button below.

Deploy to Vercel

Once you have an image generator that sparks joy, you can setup automatic GitHub deployments so that pushing to main will deploy to production! 🚀

Credits

This is a fork of the lovely Open Graph Image Generator created by Vercel. Special thanks to their clearly-written and reuse-friendly repository!