Sipi - Simple Image Presentation Interface

Overview

Simple Image Presentation Interface (SIPI) is a multithreaded, high-performance, IIIF compatible media server developed by the Swiss National Data and Service Center for the Humanities at the University of Basel. It is designed to be used by archives, libraries, and other institutions that need to preserve high-quality images while making them available online.

SIPI implements the Image API 3.0 of the International Image Interoperability Framework (IIIF), and efficiently converts between image formats, preserving metadata contained in image files. In particular, if images are stored in JPEG 2000 format, Sipi can convert them on the fly to formats that are commonly used on the Internet. SIPI offers a flexible framework for specifying authentication and authorization logic in Lua scripts, and supports restricted access to images, either by reducing image dimensions or by adding watermarks. It can easily be integrated with Knora. In addition SIPI preserves most of the EXIF, IPTC and XMP metadata and can preserve or transform ICC color profiles.

In addition, a simple webserver is integrated. The server is able to serve most common file types. In addition Lua scripts and embedded Lua (i.e., Lua embedded into HTML pages using the tags <lua>…</lua> are supported.

SIPI can also be used from the command line to convert images to/from TIFF-, JPEG 2000, JPEG- and PNG- formats. For all these conversion, SIPI tries to preserve all embedded metadata such as

• IPTC
• EXIF
• XMP
• ICC color profiles. However, due to the limitations of some file formats, it cannot be guaranteed that all metadata and ICC profiles are preserved.
• JPEG2000 (J2k) does not allow all types of ICC profiles profiles. Unsupported profile types will be added to the J2k header as comment and will be

SIPI is a free software, released under the GNU Affero General Public License. It is written in C++ and runs on Linux and macOS. Note: In order to compile SIPI, the user has to provide a licensed source of the kakadu software.

It is written in C++ and runs on Linux (including Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS) and macOS.

Freely distributable binary releases are available daschswiss/sipi as docker image.

Documentation

The documentation is online at https://sipi.io.

To build it locally, you will need MkDocs. In the root the source tree, type:

make docs-build

You will then find the manual under site/index.html.

Building from source

All commands are run from the repository root via make. Run make help for a full list of targets.

Build and test with Docker (recommended)

make docker-build    # build Docker image (compiles + runs unit tests)
make test-smoke      # run smoke tests against Docker image

Build and test with Nix (native development)

nix develop          # enter Nix development shell (GCC)
make nix-build       # build SIPI (debug + coverage)
make nix-test        # run unit tests
make nix-test-e2e    # run end-to-end tests
make nix-run         # start SIPI server

Build on macOS (not recommended)

mkdir -p ./build-mac && cd build-mac && cmake .. && make && ctest --verbose

See Building SIPI from Source Code for full details.

Sentry.io

If you would like to use Sentry.io for error reporting, you can set the environment variable SIPI_SENTRY_DSN to the DSN of your Sentry project. If you do not set this variable, Sentry.io will not be used.

Further variables can be set to configure the Sentry client:

• SIPI_SENTRY_ENVIRONMENT: The environment in which the application is running. Defaults to development.
• SIPI_SENTRY_RELEASE: The release version number of the application.

Sentry captures two categories of events:

• Fatal crashes (SIGSEGV, SIGABRT) — captured in both server and CLI modes.
• Image processing failures (CLI mode) — when a CLI conversion fails, a Sentry event is sent with rich image context (dimensions, colorspace, channels, bits/sample, ICC profile type, file paths). Events are tagged with sipi.phase, sipi.colorspace, sipi.bps, and sipi.output_format for filtering and alerting.

See docs/src/running.md for full details on CLI exit codes, error output format, and integration guidance for calling services.

Releases

Releases are published on Dockerhub: https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/daschswiss/sipi

How should I write my commits?

We are using Conventional Commit messages.

The most important prefixes you should have in mind are:

• fix: which represents bug fixes, and correlates to a SemVer patch.
• feat: which represents a new feature, and correlates to a SemVer minor.
• feat!:, or fix!:, refactor!:, etc., which represent a breaking change (indicated by the !) and will result in a SemVer major.

This is the complete list of what is defined and if it is visible in the changelog:

• 'feat' -> section: 'Features'
• 'feature' -> section: 'Features'
• 'fix' -> section: 'Bug Fixes'
• 'perf' -> section: 'Performance Improvements'
• 'revert' -> section: 'Reverts'
• 'docs' -> section: 'Documentation', hidden: true
• 'style' -> section: 'Styles', hidden: true
• 'chore' -> section: 'Miscellaneous Chores', hidden: true
• 'refactor' -> section: 'Code Refactoring', hidden: true
• 'test' -> section: 'Tests', hidden: true
• 'build' -> section: 'Build System', hidden: true
• 'ci' -> section: 'Continuous Integration', hidden: true

# Contact Information

DaSCH Support `<support@dasch.swiss>`