Una historia de cómo mejoré mis tarjetas de Twitter.
Comparto las publicaciones de mi blog en Twitter, y hubo un momento en que me entretuve dibujando una imagen para cada publicación de blog.
Configuré Hugo para que use una imagen llamadabanner.png
obanner.jpg
almacenado en la carpeta de publicaciones para ser utilizado como la imagen de Open Graph, así:
<meta property="og:image" content="https://flaviocopes.com/axios/banner.png" />
Si una publicación no tiene imagen, muestro mi avatar en su lugar:
<meta property="og:image" content="https://flaviocopes.com/img/avatar.png" />
Hay un problema: dejé de hacer esas imágenes de banner personalizadas hace mucho tiempo y la mayoría de mis publicaciones no tienen un banner.
Todos se ven iguales en Twitter:
No hay forma de que pueda hacer como 500 imágenes de banner a mano. He pensado en generarlos programáticamente desde que viHackers independientesgenerar esas imágenes para las publicaciones del blog del foro (una gran idea):
Entonces, después de encontrar una buena inspiración para una imagen de banner, decidí hacer un banner personalizado para cada una de las publicaciones de mi blog.
El banner es una imagen PNG, y para mantener la publicación enfocada en el tema ("cómo crear y guardar una imagen con Node.js y Canvas"), omitiré algunas partes.
Además, hay muchas formas diferentes de hacer lo que hice, aquí hay solo una.
En primer lugar, ¿qué paquetes npm necesitamos?
¡Solo uno!canvas
:
npm install canvasThis package provides us a Node.js based implementation of the Canvas API that we know and love in the browser.
In other words, everything I use to generate images also works in the browser.
Except instead of getting a Canvas instance from a <canvas>
HTML element, I load the library, get the function createCanvas
out of it:
const { createCanvas } = require('canvas')
Then I call this function passing the canvas width and height, which I set to 1200x600:
const width = 1200
const height = 600
const canvas = createCanvas(width, height)
const context = canvas.getContext(‘2d’)
Let’s paint it black (casually dropping a Rolling Stones reference):
context.fillStyle = '#fff'
context.fillRect(0, 0, width, height)

Let’s now switch to adding text.
I first pick the Menlo font, big and bold. I align it in the center, then I set the color white.
Finally I call context.fillText()
to draw the text on the canvas:
const text = 'Hello, World!'
context.font = ‘bold 70pt Menlo’
context.textAlign = ‘center’
context.fillStyle = ‘#fff’
context.fillText(text, 600, 170)

Let’s draw a blue box behind the text:
const text = 'Hello, World!'
context.textBaseline = ‘top’
context.fillStyle = ‘#3574d4’
const textWidth = context.measureText(text).width
context.fillRect(600 - textWidth / 2 - 10, 170 - 5, textWidth + 20, 120)
context.fillStyle = ‘#fff’
context.fillText(text, 600, 170)
We set the textBaseline
property to be top
to ease the positioning of the rectangle. Then I check how ling the text is, using measureText()
, and I draw it using the same coordinates we used to draw the text.
Make sure you draw the rectangle before the text, because in Canvas you draw things one on top of each other, in order:

Cool! Now I want to show my website URL at the bottom:
context.fillStyle = '#fff'
context.font = 'bold 30pt Menlo'
context.fillText('flaviocopes.com', 600, 530)

And I also want to add my logo. To do this, let’s import the loadImage
function from the canvas
module:
const { createCanvas, loadImage } = require('canvas')
and we call it specifying the logo.png
image contained in the same folder where we run the script:
loadImage('./logo.png').then(image => {
})
Once the promise is resolved, we have the image object and we can draw it to the canvas using drawImage()
:
loadImage('./logo.png').then(image => {
context.drawImage(image, 340, 515, 70, 70)
})

That’s it! Now we can save the image to an image.png
file using the toBuffer()
method:
const buffer = canvas.toBuffer('image/png')
fs.writeFileSync('./image.png', buffer)
Here is the full code:
const fs = require('fs')
const { createCanvas, loadImage } = require('canvas')
const width = 1200
const height = 630
const canvas = createCanvas(width, height)
const context = canvas.getContext(‘2d’)
context.fillStyle = ‘#000’
context.fillRect(0, 0, width, height)
context.font = ‘bold 70pt Menlo’
context.textAlign = ‘center’
context.textBaseline = ‘top’
context.fillStyle = ‘#3574d4’
const text = ‘Hello, World!’
const textWidth = context.measureText(text).width
context.fillRect(600 - textWidth / 2 - 10, 170 - 5, textWidth + 20, 120)
context.fillStyle = ‘#fff’
context.fillText(text, 600, 170)
context.fillStyle = ‘#fff’
context.font = ‘bold 30pt Menlo’
context.fillText(‘flaviocopes.com’, 600, 530)
loadImage(’./logo.png’).then(image => {
context.drawImage(image, 340, 515, 70, 70)
const buffer = canvas.toBuffer(‘image/png’)
fs.writeFileSync(’./test.png’, buffer)
})
Download my free Node.js Handbook
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