CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsexpresscouchdb
Costa Michailidis
Costa Michailidis

Reputation: 8178

How to get images to the client?

I'm building a website on express.js and I'm wondering where to store images. Certain 'static' website info like the team pages will be backed by a database. If new team members come onboard, we push new data to CouchDB and a new team page shows up on the site.

A team page will include a profile picture, which will be stored in CouchDB along with other data.

Should I be sending the image through the webserver or just sending the reference to where the image is and having the client grab the image from the database, since CouchDB is an HTTP server itself?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 453

Answers (3)

Plato
Plato

Reputation: 11052

I just dump avatars in /web/images/avatars, store the filename only in couchdb, and serve the folder with express.static()

You certainly can use a couchdb attachment

You can also create an amazon s3 bucket and save the absolute https path on your user objects

Upvotes: 1

Ingo Radatz
Ingo Radatz

Reputation: 1225

You can store the profile pics (and any other file) as attachments to the docs. The load is the same like for every other web-server.

Documentation:

CouchDB manages the ETags for attachments as well as for docs or views. Clients which have cached the pics already will get a light-weight 304 response for every identical request. You can try it out with my CouchDB based blog lbl.io. Open you favorite browser developer bar and observe the image requests during multiple refreshes.

Hint 1: If you have the choice between inline-attachment-upload (Base64 encoded in the doc, 1 request to create a doc with attachment) or upload-attachment-only (multipart/related in the original content type, 2 requests to create a doc with attachment or 1 request to create an attachment when the doc already exists) .... then choose the second. Its more efficient handled by CouchDB.

Hint 2: You can configure CouchDB to handle gzip compression by the content-type of attachments. It reduces the load a lot.

Upvotes: 1

kiran
kiran

Reputation: 384

I am not an expert from Couch DB, but here is my 2 cents. In general hitting DB for every image, is going to increase the load. If the website is going to be accessed by many people, that will be a lot.

Ideal way is serve it with CDN, and have the CDN server point to your resource server/ webserver.

Upvotes: 1

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