What is lust?

Lust is a static image server designed to automatically convert uploaded image to several formats and preset sizes with automatic compression optimizations along with scaling in mind.

Lust stores images via any of given database backends:

• Cassandra / ScyllaDB
• PostgreSQL
• MySQL / MariaDB
• Sqlite (file / temp file only)

Getting started

Installation

You can download a pre-made binary from the given github releases, binaries exist for both linux and windows (x64 and x86) or you can build from source. Building just requires the tradition cargo build --release.

After Instalition

See the getting started page for more information after installation.

Formats

Lust supports any of the following formats:

• Png
• JPEG
• GIF
• Webp

Any uploaded images will be given a unqiue uuid and be re-encoded into all the other enabled formats in all presets. This is especially useful when you want to serve several varients of the same image with diffrent formats.

Presets

The server can take several sizing presets which can be targetted via the size query parameter when getting an image. These presets will mean every image at upload time will be resized to fit the width and height bounds using the nearest approximation.

Regardless of presets an original image is always stored and can be accessed via the size=original query. The default preset when served without a sized parameter can be set in the configuration file via default_serving_preset key.

Compression

Lust supports Gzip compression when uploading image content and automatically creates Gzipped data varients which are what get stored in the database, in the case of most modern webbrowsers, they will accept gzip as a method of compression. If this is the case the server will serve the pre-compressed data without any CPU overhead.

This behavour can be toggled using the serve_compression_mode ket with a value being any of the following:

Compression Mode	Description
always	The server will always serve the compressed version of the image regardless of headers or query paremeters.
never	The server will never serve the compressed version of the image regardless of headers or query parameters. WARNING: This can create much higher CPU loads compared to other modes.
auto	The server will try to send the compressed version when it can either via the compress query parameter or via the Accept-Encoding header. (Recommended)

Base64 support

Lust will serve given images / gifs as Basse64 data both Gzip compressed and un-compressed via the encode query parameter (true/false) this will return a JSON response unlike the tradition raw response.