Transcode zenikanard png image to ansi sequences viewable in a terminal.

to

Also provides a webserver to serve transcoded zenikanards.

git clone https://github.com/gfeun/ansi-zenikanard
cd ansi-zenikanard
docker build -t ansi-zenikanard .
docker run -p 8080:8080 ansi-zenikanard

You can mount the cache directory to save the zenikanard cache across docker run:

docker run -v $PWD/cache:/cache -p 8080:8080 ansi-zenikanard

The default docker image built using docker build is heavy because it includes a web browser to scrape the zenikanard gallery.

If you want to build a lighter image you can use:

docker build --target light -t ansi-zenikanard:light .
docker run -p 8080:8080 ansi-zenikanard:light

This will build an image including only the webserver. This requires that you run the heavy image once to get and convert zenikanards in the cache directory. You can then pass the cache to the light image by mounting the cache directory as a volume.

You need one of the following transcoding backend installed:

• viu - Follow repo installation instructions
• img2txt - Debian: apt-get install caca-utils on Debian
• pixterm - go get -u github.com/eliukblau/pixterm/cmd/pixterm

You also need an OS compatible with playwright-go. x86-64 machines Windows/Mac/Linux should be ok.

Tested only on linux.

Ensure you have $GOPATH/bin in your path or call with full path.

The following commands will download the module and start the program.

The program will create a directory called cache in your working directory.

go get github.com/gfeun/ansi-zenikanard
ansi-zenikanard

In another terminal run:

curl http://localhost:8080

If using another backend than viu you need to specify it at the cli:

ansi-zenikanard -image-transcoder img2txt

Other options are available, see Usage section.

Usage of ansi-zenikanard:
  -cache
      use local cache (default true)
  -cache-dir string
      cache directory to store zenikanards (default "./cache")
  -cache-only
      don't scrape website, use only local cache. Useful on machine where playwright is not supported, raspi for example. Assumes cache enabled
  -fetch-only
      fetch zenikanard and stop
  -h  help
  -image-transcoder string
      program to transcode png to ansi. one of viu, img2txt, pixterm (default "viu")
  -listen-addr string
      adress and port fed to http.ListenAndServe (default ":8080")
  -playwright-install
      install browsers
  -transition-time int
      time to sleep between zenikanard in millisecond (default 500)
  -v  enable debug output

This project first fetches the zenikanards from https://theduckgallery.zenika.com/ using https://github.com/mxschmitt/playwright-go Playwright launches a headless browser which loads the duck gallery. A query selector is then used to get all img tag corresponding to zenikanards.

I first tried to download the main page and parse it manually but the list of zenikanard is downloaded with Javascript, so it is not available in the base html.

I could have downloaded the https://theduckgallery.zenika.com/contributors.js and parsed the zenikanard list from there but it was less fun than using playwright :).

Once the list of zenikanard is obtained, each zenikanard is sent on a download channel.

A pool of download worker is started and each worker listens on the download channel. When it receives a zenikanard it first checks if it is available in a local cache. If not it downloads it using its URL.

If the zenikanard is not recovered from cache, the downloaded image still needs to be converted to ANSI. In this case it is sent through another channel: the transcoding channel.

Behind this channel is another pool of workers. When a transcode worker receives a zenikanard it launches an external process and passes the png image to it. The default process called is viu which will output sequences viewable in most terminals. The resulting ansi output is stored in the zenikanard struct and in a local cache file if the cache is enabled

Finally once all zenikanards have been processed, a webserver is started providing two routes:

• GET /[github username] -> Get zenikanard of the provided github username
• GET / -> circles through all the gallery zenikanard