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favicon-service (besticon)

Source of https://icons.better-idea.org, a favicon service:

  • Supports favicon.ico and apple-touch-icon.png
  • Simple URL API
  • Fallback icon generation
  • Single binary download for easy self-hosting

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What's this?

Websites used to have a favicon.ico, or not. With the introduction of the apple-touch-icon.png finding “the icon” for a website became more complicated. This service finds and — if necessary — generates icons for web sites.

API

GET /icon

This endpoint always returns an icon image for the given site — it redirects to an official icon if possible or creates and returns a fallback image if needed.

Parameter Example Description Default
url http://yelp.com required
size 32..50..100 Desired size range (min..perfect..max) If no image of size perfect..max nor perfect..min can be found a fallback icon will be generated. required
formats png,ico Comma-separated list of accepted image formats: png, ico, gif png,ico,gif
fallback_icon_url HTTP image URL If provided, a redirect to this image will be returned in case no suitable icon could be found. This overrides the default fallback image behaviour.
fallback_icon_color ff0000 If provided, letter icons will be colored with the hex value provided, rather than be grey, when no color can be found for any icon.

Examples

Input URL Icon
https://icons.better-idea.org/icon?url=yelp.com&size=32..50..120 Icon for yelp.com
https://icons.better-idea.org/icon?url=yelp.com&size=64..64..120 Icon for yelp.com
https://icons.better-idea.org/icon?url=yelp.com size missing
https://icons.better-idea.org/icon?url=httpbin.org/status/404&size=32..64..120 Icon for non-existent page
https://icons.better-idea.org/icon?url=httpbin.org/status/404&size=32..64..120&fallback_icon_color=ff0000 Icon for non-existent page
https://icons.better-idea.org/icon?url=фминобрнауки.рф&size=32..64..120 Icon with cyrillic letter ф

GET /allicons.json

This endpoint returns all icons for a given site.

Parameter Example Description Default
url http://yelp.com required
formats png,ico Comma-separated list of accepted image formats: png, ico, gif png,ico,gif

Examples

Bugs & limitations

I tried hard to make this useful but please note there are some known limitations:

  • Poor i18n support for letter icons (#13)

Feel free to file other bugs - and offer your help - at https://github.com/mat/besticon/issues.

Self Hosting

It is recommended to use your own copy of this service if you plan to rely on it in your project. An easy way to host your own copy is to use Heroku, just go to https://heroku.com/deploy to get started.

Docker

A docker image is available at https://hub.docker.com/r/matthiasluedtke/iconserver/, generated from the Dockerfile in this repo. I try to keep it updated for every release.

Note that this docker image is not used to run https://icons.better-idea.org and therefore not well tested.

Server Executable

Download binaries

Binaries for some operating systems can be downloaded from https://github.com/mat/besticon/releases/latest

Even more binaries are available from the excellent GoBuilder community site https://gobuilder.me/github.com/mat/besticon/besticon/iconserver

Build your own

If you have Go 1.7 installed on your system you can use go get to fetch the source code and build the server:

$ go get -u github.com/mat/besticon/...

If you want to build executables for a different target operating system you can add the GOOS and GOARCH environment variables:

$ GOOS=linux GOARCH=amd64 go get -u github.com/mat/besticon/...

Running

To start the server on default port 8080 just do

$ iconserver

To use a different port use

$ PORT=80 iconserver

Now when you open http://localhost:8080/icons?url=instagram.com you should see something like Screenshot of The Favicon Finder

Configuration

There is not a lot to configure but these environment variables exist

Variable Description Default Value
PORT HTTP server port 8080
CACHE_SIZE_MB Size for the groupcache 32
HOST_ONLY_DOMAINS Comma-separated list of domains where requests for http://example.com/foobar will be rewritten to http://example.com. HOST_ONLY_DOMAINS used by https://icons.better-idea.org. See #27.

Libraries etc.

Package Description License
http://github.com/NYTimes/gziphandler net/http gzip compression Apache License, Version 2.0
http://github.com/PuerkitoBio/goquery BSD style
http://github.com/andybalholm/cascadia CSS selectors License
http://github.com/golang/groupcache Apache License 2.0
http://github.com/golang/protobuf License
http://github.com/golang/freetype FreeType License
http://golang.org/x/image supplementary image libraries BSD style
http://golang.org/x/net BSD style
http://golang.org/x/text BSD style
Noto Sans font used for the generated icons SIL Open Font License 1.1
The icon used on icons.better-idea.org License

Contributors

License

MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2015-2017 Matthias Lüdtke, Hamburg - https://github.com/mat

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Donate

If you find this useful and want to donate... you would make my day :-)

Donate at PayPal

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