pexels

An application that pulls images from Pexels and adds them as your background photo.

1. Introduction

The pexels application is written entirely in Golang and currently runs as a binary that acts as a HTTP server. This server accepts requests that perform actions such as:

1. Fetching New Photos: _Given a Pexel Image ID
2. Fetching Random Photos: 
3. Automatically Setting a Downloaded Image as a backdrop.

2. Installation

The current way of installing the application is to use Docker. The image is in no current dockerhub repository (waiting for test coverage to be sufficient).

2.1 Docker

1. Download the repository either as a zip or via git clone.
2. Ensure you have docker installed on your machine.
3. Build the image using the following command

docker build -t pexels:0.1-RC-1 .

4. Run once successfully built (check console for errors). Run the container with the following command:

`docker run  -p 9191:9191 --restart=always  -v /home/<your-user>/.pexels:/home/appuser/.pexels  --name pexels-daemon pexels:0.1-RC-1`

Ensure to change <your-user> to the actual user.

5. The container should be running in the background.

2.1.1 Things to note about Docker Install

1. As the application is running in a separate linux environment (docker container). It currently cannot access the hosts system to change the background. This will have to be done manually in the /home/<your-user>/.pexels/pictures directory.
2. By default the application runs on port 9191. If you want to change this, this currently can only be done in source and Dockerfile. An issue to modify this is in the pipeline

2. Using the application

The application currently only runs as a server so some HTTP request will need to be made in order to interact with the server

1. Get a Photo By ID

curl localhost:9191/new/{id}

Where {id} is an integer value id that corresponds to a pexels image.

2. Get Random Photo

curl localhost:9191/rand?size="original"

This returns a random photo from their curated page. The size parameter is optional so you can exclude it. If excluded, it shall download their large size by default. The original is Pexel's highest quality image. A sizing guide can be seen by running the command in the next section.

3. Get Photo Sizing Information

curl localhost:9191/sizes

This outputs their sizes that can be used as HTTP URL query parameters when wanting to obtain pictures of a certain size and quality. Once you have read the size description run any command that retrieves the photos with a given size parameter e.g. curl localhost:9191/rand?size="portrait"

Contributions

Play around with the application and create some issues if you encounter a bug, or would like to see something added.

Disclaimer

I am not affiliated with Pexels, and this is not their Official Application. I just thought it would be a fun little tool.