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Publishing to the images namespace

Eik's provides an image namespace for uploading images. The purpose of this namespace is three-fold.

  1. By creating a separate namespace, files that change infrequently (images and other media) can be uploaded and versioned separately from files that change often (JavaScript and CSS)
  2. An image manipulation service such as Fastly's image optimization can be placed in front of this namespace.
  3. Your Eik server can be configured to allow larger package sizes on the image namespace and smaller package sizes on other namespaces.

In this document you'll learn how to:

  • publish images to your Eik server
  • how to update existing images
  • create an alias that can be updated as you publish new patch or minor versions of your images

Preparing images for Eik​

The image namespace on Eik works the same way as for application code. You will need:

  • some images to upload
  • an eik.json

Configure Eik​

The first step is to create an eik.json file.

eik init

Open the newly created eik.json and fill out the required fields.

{
	"name": "my-images",
	"type": "image",
	"version": "1.0.0",
	"server": "https://eik.store.com",
	"files": "./path/to/images/folder"
}
tip

If your organisation doesn't have a running Eik server yet, hop on over to the server documentation.

The files key should be set to a directory containing image files to publish. Eik does not discriminate file types so if you wish to upload videos and other types of media, this will also work.

Publish the images​

Let's update the "files" field in eik.json to include an images folder in our imaginary project.

{
	"name": "my-images",
	"type": "image",
	"version": "1.0.0",
	"server": "https://eik.store.com",
	"files": "./images/"
}

Now you can log in to the Eik server and publish, same as when publishing an application.

eik login --key YOUR_EIK_KEY
eik publish

At this point your images should be available on the path https://eik.store.com/img/my-images/1.0.0.

tip

You should keep package.json, eik.json and the build script in version control so you don't have to recreate this setup when there are updates.

Get information about a published package​

To view publish information, you can use the eik meta command.

eik meta my-images

Updating a published package​

New versions of the image package need to be published to the Eik server, either manually or with automation like Renovate or Dependabot. Whether you choose to automate or have a manual process, these are the steps to update a module.

  1. Add, remove or update images in your images directory
  2. Update the version number in eik.json
  3. Run the build script
  4. Publish to the Eik server