Candidator

Web service for generating images with selected candidates and their numbers.

Use case

I am competition organizer or political party and I want to let people to choose their favorite candidates. The result of the choice will be an image which can be shared on social media.

How it looks

How to run

There is an example in repository which can be directly served via

php -S localhost:8000

Then open following url in your browser

http://localhost:8000/example.php?nrs=1-2-10-14

Where you can modify nrs parameter to contain from one to four numbers delimited by -. Maximum number in example is 18.

You need to have installed PHP and enabled extension=gd.

How to run with docker

If you do not have PHP installed you can build and run docker image

docker build -t candidator .
docker run -i -p 8000:80 candidator

How to include in your code

In the simplest case you can serve candidator with following code

<?php
    require 'candidator.php';
    (new Candidator())->serve();
?>

Beside candidator.php you need folders lib and assets.

If you would like to change some configuration use code similar to following

<?php
    require 'candidator.php';
    
    // Create
    $gen = new Candidator();

    // Configure
    $gen->out_path = '/tmp/candidator/render';
    $gen->images_root = './assets/candidates';
    $gen->no_img_path_male = './assets/silhouette-male.png';
    $gen->no_img_path_female = './assets/silhouette-female.png';
    $gen->c_data_path = './assets/candidates.json';

    // Serve
    $gen->serve();
?>

If you would like to just generate image you can use code similar to following

<?php
    require 'candidator.php';

    // Create
    $gen = new Candidator();

    // Get input numbers
    $numbers = array(1, 2, 10, 14);

    // Generate image
    $image = $gen->generate($numbers);
?>

How to customize

Candidates

Candidates are by default defined in file assets/candidates.json. This file contains JSON array with entry per each candidate.

Candidate object has following attributes

• name with full name of candidate (not used yet)
• number with candidate number (always required)
• img with path to candidate image (not required but good to have :) )
• gender with m for male or f for female (required when img is not specified)

Background

By default assets/background.png file is used as background. You can replace this file or change background_img_path configuration attribute.

Background image needs to be PNG or JPEG file !

No candidate image

If candidate has not specified img attribute then based on candidate gender one of silhouette images assets/silhouette-male.png or assets/silhouette-female.png will be used. You can replace these files for your owns or change no_img_path_male and no_img_path_female configuration attributes.

Silhouette images needs:

• to be PNG file or JPEG !
• to have same size as candidate images !

Output path

You can specify path where images will be saved and reused if somebody requests same combination of candidates again. Default path is /tmp/candidator/render directory and can be changed with configuration attribute out_path.

When running example.php you can force regeneration of images with adding request parameter force=1, e.g. http://localhost:8000/example.php?nrs=1-2-10-14&force=1.

Credits

Images of candidates were designed by macrovector / Freepik.

Font junegull used in background image and generated text was taken from 1001freefonts.com.

For drawing nice circles with antialiasing Ulrich Mierendorff's library was used.