GoogleCloudPlatform
libvips Preinstalled on Base Image
Now that libvips is the default image processor for Rails is there a way to have that on the base image like Imagemagick? As it stands now, a stock Rails app won't run fully on GAE.
Of course we can reconfigure the app to use ImageMagick still. But given the security, performance and memory issues that library has, it would be nice to take advantage of a better setup.
I attempted to add libvips42 to runtime_config.packages in the app.yaml file. This did succeed in installing libvips but unfortunately the base image on GCP is so old (Ubuntu 16.04) the version of libvips installed is too old for Rails to use. There is another ticket discussing updating the base image to something more modern with a timeline given of 2nd qtr 2021 but obviously that didn't happen.
For now I'm reverting back to ImageMagick but wanted to inquire about libvips.
We're now working on updating the base image to 20.04 (#221), and have added libvips-dev to it. I just got finished doing general end-to-end testing on the image, and we should be rolling it out late next week or early the following week.
Closing this. Recently finally was able to try switching back to libvips and it now works perfectly on GAE. Thanks!