File conversion can be a pain. Especially when you're trying to automate it. That's why I created Versed, a microservice specifically for that purpose.

Versed exposes a web API for converting files, and also comes with a simple web frontend for manual file conversion.

It's currently powered by LibreOffice and FFmpeg, which means it supports the same file formats that those tools support, but you can easily add more tools to its arsenal.

Read the blog post to learn more!

Run the following commands to get up and running.

git clone https://github.com/sgbj/versed.git
cd versed
docker build -t versed .
docker run -d -p 3000:3000 versed

# this app uses https://github.com/debug-js/debug 
# and if you want to see more logging use the DEBUG environment variable
docker run -it --rm -e DEBUG=versed* -p 3000:3000 versed

Open a browser window and go to http://localhost:3000/.

You can access the OpenAPI (aka Swagger) 2.0 spec by accessing http://localhost:3000/openapi-spec.yaml or by opening the file in the public/ folder of the repo. You can generate a client for this microservice by using https://editor.swagger.io/. An example Python client (and an example usage script) is included in the clients/ folder of the repo.

One way to consume the convert endpoint in Node.js code is by using the request package.

const fs = require('fs');
const request = require('request');

let req = request.post('http://localhost:3000/convert');
let form = req.form();
form.append('file', fs.createReadStream('video.mp4'));
form.append('format', 'gif');
req.pipe(fs.createWriteStream('image.gif'));

# this will convert `testdata/file-sample_100kB.docx` to pdf and save it using the filename given in the resonse header.
curl -F format=pdf -F "file=@testdata/file-sample_100kB.docx" -OJ  http://localhost:3000/convert