Note

TLS certificate required for HTTPS- use included keygen.sh script (Linux) to generate test certs
Image processing and caching are optional features configured at compile time

Nano Image Server

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A tiny, blazingly fast image server with on-the-fly processing and intelligent caching. Built with Axum and Tokio for true async, memory-safe, thread-safe performance.

Features

Core

• Low-latency image delivery - Optimized asynchronous I/O and Multithreading with Tokio runtime
• HTTPS-only - Secure by default with TLS 1.3 support
• Modular design - Enable only the features you will need during build time

Optional Features

• S3-FIFO Cache- Intelligent frequency-based caching achieving 85%+ hit rates on normal workloads
• On-the-fly processing - Resize, transform, filter images via URL parameters
• Selective compilation - Minimal builds for edge deployment

Performance

With S3-FIFO cache enabled:

• 80%+ cache hit rate on realistic workloads based on benchmarks
• 10% Higher Throughput and Requests per second improvements
• Millisecond cached response times
• Thread-safe concurrent access with lock-free frequency tracking

Usage

Minimal (serving only):

cargo build --release

With caching:

cargo build --release --features cache 

With image processing:

cargo build --release --features processing

Full featured:

cargo build --release --features cache,processing 

Start the server

# Basic usage
./nano_image_server --cert-path ./certs 

With cache (100 image capacity)

./nano_image_server --cert-path ./certs --cache-capacity 100

Use --help for all available parameters

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Image operations

Warning

A plugin based system for image operations is being developed. The provided API can change drastically until stable release. V0.6.0-beta does not include image processing by default but you can opt in by the following method during building

cargo build --release -F processing 

Availible image operations

Operation	Query	Examples
Resize	resfilter=nearest/triangle/lanczos	resfilter=nearest
Filter	filter=blur/bw/brighten/contrast	filter=blur&f_param=1.0
Transform	transform=fliph/flipv/rotate	transform=rotate&t_param=90
Convert	to=format	to=webp

Supported Formats

Format	Support Level
AVIF	Decode: Yes*, Encode: Lossy
BMP, GIF, ICO, JPEG, PNG	Full Support
WebP	Decode: Yes, Encode: Lossless
TIFF, TGA, PNM, QOI, HDR, EXR	Full Support