Node Avatar Generator (Made for Rocketbeans.tv)

• Angular 5+
• ExpressJS ( 4.x - with compression )
• Webpack ( angular-cli )

Concepts

The base concept is to generate a md5 hash and get a different avatar for each hash. There for this avatar generator can use up to (16 * 16 * 16) 4096 images. If not all images are in place it will have a fallback to a default image.

The md5 hash is splitted into 16 categories: [00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00][00]. For every combination of the 2 characters can be used 1 image. The zIndex of in image is seperated by and underscore after the 2 hash characters. If a image for a character combination is not existing, it will fallback to the categorie default image. The default image is set in the Directory model. The category folders are located in /server/public/images/bavatar. Within these categories(dirs) you have to place the images.

To store the old generated images, there is a version number in the image link. After changing or adding images the version number should be increased. Otherwise Avatars generated in the past might change.

This project also contains a UI for building that avatar. See a demo here http://bohnen-generator.share-my-app.com.

Install / Development

Make sure you are able to run the npm canvas packages. https://github.com/Automattic/node-canvas

git clone https://github.com/Leon-Bor/node-avatar-generator.git
cd node-avatar-generator

# Install dependencies
npm install

# start server
npm run start

# Client url: http://localhost:5000
# Application ( epxress ) API: http://localhost:5005

Build / Production

npm run build

## Deploy dist folder to app server

Structure of dist folder:

/dist/server <-- expressjs
/dist/client <-- angular2

npm i -g pm2
pm2 start pm2.config.js --env production