Running Thumbd on Heroku

Running Thumbd on Heroku

Deploying and running Thumbd on Heroku is simple, however, currently in its stock form, video thumbnailing fails due to an internal ImageMagick error. To get video thumbnailing working on Heroku, you need to use custom buildpack to have an external ffmpeg binary. The guide below would cover the basics of deploying on Heroku as well as setting up custom buildpack.

1. Start by creating a new app and setting following env variables that are required by Thumbd

AWS_KEY:    [your aws key]
AWS_REGION: [aws region]
AWS_SECRET: [aws secret]
BUCKET:     [bucket name]
SQS_QUEUE:  [sqs queue name]

Note that for SQS_QUEUE you only need to set the actual queue name without any numeric prefix.

2. Set the following env variable required for using multiple buildpacks

BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-multi.git

3. Create a file .buildpacks in the project root with following content

https://github.com/shunjikonishi/heroku-buildpack-ffmpeg
https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs.git

When deploying, Heroku will fetch the buildpacks configured in .buildpacks file and have it available to the app.

4. Now you can use 'custom' strategy in Thumbd to specify ffmpeg conversion command to generate video thumbnail. Here is an example command that you can specify in strategy field in the thumbnailing request to Thumbd

 "ffmpeg  -itsoffset -0  -i %(localPaths[0])s -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -y -filter:v crop=%(width)s:%(height)s %(convertedPath)s"

An example request for video thumbnailing should look something like this:

{
  "original": "/path/to/object/video1.mp4",
  "prefix": "/path/to/object/video1",
  "descriptions": [
      {
          "suffix": "medium",
          "width": 150,
          "height": 150,
          "strategy": "ffmpeg  -itsoffset -0  -i %(localPaths[0])s -vcodec mjpeg -vframes 1 -y -filter:v crop=%(width)s:%(height)s %(convertedPath)s"
      }
  ]
}

Note that this solution requires the client to check for the media type of the object beforehand to identify if its a video and use custom strategy as above. Images can still use other standard Thumbd strategies.