Tachyon Faster than light image resizing service that runs on AWS. Super simple to set up, highly available and very performant.
A Human Made project. Maintained by @joehoyle.

Tachyon is a faster than light image resizing service that runs on AWS. Super simple to set up, highly available and very performant.

Setup

Tachyon comes in two parts: the server to serve images and the plugin to use it. To use Tachyon, you need to run at least one server, as well as the plugin on all sites you want to use it.

Installation on AWS Lambda

We require using Tachyon on AWS Lambda to offload image processing task in a serverless configuration. This ensures you don't need lots of hardware to handle thousands of image resize requests, and can scale essentially infinitely. One Tachyon stack is required per S3 bucket, so we recommend using a common region bucket for all sites, which then only requires a single Tachyon stack per region.

Tachyon requires the following Lambda Function spec:

• Runtime: Node JS 18
• Function URL activated
• Env vars:
  • S3_BUCKET=my-bucket
  • S3_REGION=my-bucket-region
  • S3_ENDPOINT=http://my-custom-endpoint (optional)
  • S3_FORCE_PATH_STYLE=1 (optional)

Take the lambda.zip from the latest release and upload it to your function.

Documentation

• Plugin Setup
• Using Tachyon
• Hints and Tips

Credits

Created by Human Made for high volume and large-scale sites. We run Tachyon on sites with millions of monthly page views, and thousands of sites.

Written and maintained by Joe Hoyle.

Tachyon is inspired by Photon by Automattic. As Tachyon is not an all-purpose image resizer, rather it uses a media library in Amazon S3, it has a different use case to Photon.

Tachyon uses the Sharp (Used under the license Apache License 2.0) Node.js library for the resizing operations, which in turn uses the great libvips library.

Interested in joining in on the fun? Join us, and become human!