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Build libvips along with all its dependencies, from source to build statically. Single binary to deploy to lightweight containers.

1 starsMakefile

Static libvips builds, pick only the formats you need

Name: Static libvips builds, pick only the formats you need
Availability: InStock
Author: u84u

by u84u·Jul 23, 2026·1 point·0 comments

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AI Analysis

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Static libvips builds with selectable codecs finally solve dependency hell for image microservices.

Strengths

•Recursively builds dependencies from git submodules rather than relying on distro packages.
•Includes a verify target that round-trips real images to validate codec functionality automatically.

Weaknesses

•Missing Rust-based dependencies like librsvg and imagequant due to toolchain constraints.
•Manual Makefile maintenance is required when upstream libvips updates its dependency tree.

Post Description

hi HN, for a personal project of mine I needed libvips with several different formats, and it didn;t quite cover my needs. So i sat down for a weekend and setup a simple makefile that compiled all the dependencies of libvips statically and linked together for a single .a file per dependency. However that project never finished and the makefile just sat there. recently i recovered the old makefile and used claude to finally finish what i wanted. you pick the formats using FORMATS="jpeg png webp" and the deps are recursively built, statically. what cannot be built without more effort is installed via the package managers.