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Usage

Test-run​

Fantastic! Let's try it and see what happens!

$ ipp

If everything is set up right, you should get a bunch of text come up on screen in red, complaining about a configuration error. Well, you haven't told IPP what to do yet!

Breaking it down​

If no pipeline is specified, the CLI provides a sane config by default, creating 8 formats for every image, at 4 different sizes and two codecs (original + WebP). It will also export a very simple manifest file (more on this later). You still have to specify and input and output directory, however.

$ ipp --input images_folder --output assets_folder

If everything went well (and you provided some images), IPP should report completion and the output folder should contain your newly generated formats, along with a manifest file! For many use cases, the default configuration should be sufficient. Let's take a look on how to go a step further.

Configuration​

Image Processing Pipeline supports a few different configuration file formats and location, anything supported by the cosmiconfig library. We recommend using the YAML format, as it makes it a lot easier to read and write your image pipeline. Lets make a quick configuration file now:

.ipprc.yml
input: images
output: build

pipeline:
  - pipe: convert
    options:
      format: webp
    save: "[source.name].webp"

Once you have created that file inside of your project folder, add some images to a folder called images, create a build folder, and try running IPP again.

$ ipp

That was easier! No need to specify the directory each time. If you look in your build folder, each image should have been converted into the WebP codec, a superior, if somewhat less supported image format. It is good practice to also create a JPEG variant for older browsers (and Safari, for some reason...).

We'll touch more on this in the pipeline section.

Flags​

There are a few basic CLI flags that allow you to quickly confiure the CLI, namely setting the input/output directory, a path to a configuration file and the ability to use a simple text renderer.

See the CLI reference to learn more.

$ ipp -i images -o build/images -c ipp-config.json --text