manifold/og-image/README.md
Austin Chen 4b2412c49c
Set up a custom OpenGraph image generator for social media previews (#20)
* Copy in og-image code

* Add "yarn start" command in lieu of vercel

* Don't require that images be sourced from vercel

* Load in Major Mono and Readex fonts

* Fix vercel config (?)

* Replace default image with Manifold's

* Add some brief instructions on getting started

* In the UI, use the default image

* Fix typescript errors

* More typescript fixing
2022-01-07 12:07:38 -08:00

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3.1 KiB
Markdown

# Quickstart
1. To get started: `yarn install`
2. To test locally: `yarn start`
The local image preview is broken for some reason; but the service works.
E.g. try `http://localhost:3000/manifold.png`
3. To deploy: push to Github
For more info, see Contributing.md
nb2: (Not `dev` because that's reserved for Vercel)
nb3: (Or `cd .. && vercel --prod`, I think)
(Everything below is from the original repo)
# [Open Graph Image as a Service](https://og-image.vercel.app)
<a href="https://twitter.com/vercel">
<img align="right" src="https://og-image.vercel.app/tweet.png" height="300" />
</a>
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.
See the image embedded in the tweet for a real use case.
## 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](http://ogp.me) says you can put a `<meta>` tag in the `<head>` of a webpage to define this image.
It looks like the following:
```html
<head>
<title>Title</title>
<meta property="og:image" content="http://example.com/logo.jpg" />
</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 `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:
```html
<head>
<title>Hello World</title>
<meta
property="og:image"
content="https://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](https://github.com/vercel/og-image/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md) for more info)
5. Remove all configuration inside `vercel.json` besides `rewrites`
6. Run locally with `vercel dev` and visit [localhost:3000](http://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. Connect [Vercel for GitHub](https://vercel.com/github) to automatically deploy each time you `git push` 🚀
## Authors
- Steven ([@styfle](https://twitter.com/styfle)) - [Vercel](https://vercel.com)
- Evil Rabbit ([@evilrabbit](https://twitter.com/evilrabbit_)) - [Vercel](https://vercel.com)