gdaisy

A highly experimental image templating system based on PHP-GD to dynamically generate image banners and covers.

Installation

1. Require erikaheidi/gdaisy in your project using Composer:

composer require erikaheidi/gdaisy

2. Once it's installed, you can run the default script to generate an example cover based on meta tags.

Gdaisy comes with an example script that generates a header image adequately sized for Twitter, based on a default template. The vendor/bin/gdaisy generate script expects the URL to fetch as first parameter and the output path as second parameter, as follows:

./vendor/bin/gdaisy generate https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-visual-studio-code-for-php-projects output.png

This will generate the following image:

The example generation script is defined in vendor/erikaheidi/gdaisy/bin/gdaisy.

Creating Templates

Consider the following basic.json template example:

{
  "width": 600,
  "height": 600,
  "background": "FFFFFF",
  "elements": {
    "title": {
      "type": "text",
      "properties": {
        "pos_x": 50,
        "pos_y": 20,
        "size": 30,
        "color": "666666",
        "max_width": 500,
        "align": "center"
      }
    },
    "thumbnail": {
      "type": "image",
      "properties": {
        "pos_x": 50,
        "pos_y": 50,
        "width": 500,
        "height": 500
      }
    }
  }
}

This template has two elements: title (type text) and thumbnail (type image).

Template Properties:

• width: Resulting image width
• height: Resulting image height
• background: Resulting image background

Text Properties:

• pos_x: X coordinate (bottom left X coordinate for the base of text)
• pos_y: Y coordinate (botom left Y coordinate for the base of text)
• size: Text size
• color: Text Color (hex)
• max_width (optional): Maximum text width - text will be broken down into multiple lines when set
• align (optional): Text align, possible values are left(default), center, or right.
• font: path to font file (ttf)

Image Properties:

• pos_x: X coordinate (top left corner) where the image will be applied
• pos_y: Y coordinate (top left corner) where the image will be applied,
• width: width (will proportially resize to fit)
• height: height (will proportially resize to fit)
• image_file (optional): when set, will use this image, otherwise you'll have to provide this as parameter when applying the template
• crop (optional): when set to center, will resize-crop while centering the image. Default is left, can also be set to right.

Following, a PHP script to generate a new image based on the example template:

<?php

use GDaisy\Template;

require __DIR__. '/vendor/autoload.php';

$template = Template::create(__DIR__ . '/resources/templates/basic.json');

$template->apply("thumbnail", [
    "image_file" => __DIR__ . '/resources/images/gdaisy.png'
])->apply("title", [
    "text" => "generated with gdaisy"
]);

$template->write('output.png');
echo "Finished.\n";