Build a Simple Image Hosting Service with OpenList

Recently, I discovered that Alist was acquired by a controversial company, which prompted the community to create a new project called OpenList. OpenList is a fork of Alist, fully open-source and community-driven. Inspired by this, I decided to build an image hosting service based on OpenList, similar to what I did with Alist before. This project is called openlist-bed (hereinafter referred to as bed).

Core Features

• No database required; all data is stored in OpenList
• Supports common web-friendly image formats: JPEG, PNG, GIF, WebP
• Supports decoding iOS HEIC images and encoding them into web-friendly formats
• Provides basic image compression functionality
• Supports custom optimization via URL query parameters, such as width, height, quality, and format (not fully implemented yet)
• Automatically detects browser support for WebP and serves optimized images accordingly
• Provides a binary for Typora to upload images

How It Works

Thanks to OpenList’s API, I built a simple SDK to interact with the OpenList server, primarily for uploading and fetching images.

When a user uploads an image to bed, the service performs the following steps:

1. Attempts to load the image and ensures it is valid
2. Compresses the image if the compress option is provided
3. Renames the image to {unix}_{width}x{height} unless the keep_name option is set to true
4. Uploads the image to the OpenList server via the SDK
5. Refreshes the target path in OpenList

When a user accesses an image from bed, the service performs the following steps:

1. Parses the URL to extract the path and query parameters
2. Fetches the image from the OpenList server via the SDK
3. Converts the image to WebP if auto_webp is enabled and the browser supports WebP
4. Applies optimizations based on the query parameters
5. Returns the optimized image to the user

Installation

Since the core of the image hosting service depends on libvips, which can be tricky to configure, it is recommended to deploy using Docker

We provide a docker-compose.yml to help you deploy faster. Here is an example of deploying with 1Panel. First, you need to obtain the OpenList token. Go to the OpenList admin panel → Settings → Others, scroll to the bottom, and you will find your token.

Next, go to 1Panel, create a new orchestration in the Containers → Orchestration page, copy the docker-compose content we provided, and paste it. Replace OPENLIST_TOKEN with the token you just found, and modify other options according to the table below: