Building an OpenGraph image generation API with Cloudinary, Netlify Functions, and React
OpenGraph images are the images you see when you paste a link into a social platform and it "unfurls" into an image, title, and description. This happens on Twitter, Discord, Slack, and many other platforms. This collection goes over everything from designing OpenGraph images in Figma, to implementing them in CodeSandbox, to returning headless browser screenshots from Netlify Functions, and finally using Cloudinary as a write-through cache.
You will come away from this collection with the ability to ship an API that you can use on any of your sites, and also on-demand, that can generate images for not only OpenGraph unfurls, but also for Instagram, GitHub, and more. Using headless browsers with playwright to generate our images means we get full access to all the responsive power of CSS and all the logical power of JS to handle layout, importing assets like pngs, choosing different fonts, and more.
The image below is generated via the project you'll build and deploy in this course.
An efficient and practical course to learn how to design and create an OpenGraph for your projects. This course is still valid and relevant, with some minor differences in name dependencies, yet there are not major breaking changes.
What you'll learn
- Design an OpenGraph image in Figma
- Build the OpenGraph image as a React component
- Deploy Netlify functions in JavaScript
- Testing your OpenGraph with Twitter Card Validator
- Use Cloudinary as a write-through cache
Questions to Reflect Upon:
- Why is important to include an OpenGraph image in my project?
- How to use a headless browser?
Learner Reviews
- Learner2 years agoWhat did you like about this course?
Great course but a bit outdated which made it hard to follow. I totally get that the author can't keep updating the course indefinitely. Overall I would recommend this course to others.
- Joel Hooks4 years agoWhat did you like about this course?
This course is excellent and we used it as a basis for all of our og:images here on egghead.io
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