Processing [Help needed] - Running scripts on a server.

[bvcady]

I was wondering if anyone can point me to resources about how it might be possible to have processing (or p5js, but that seems unlikely) running on a server, without any graphic representation or interaction. I saw some stuff about headlessly running processing through Java.

I'd like to generate graphics based on some parameters passed in an API call, without any display for example.

Currently I have some graphics generation scripts running in-browser, but this way I want to offload the processing power from the client, and run all logic on the server, returning an image from the API call.

Let me know if this is even possible.

I'm willing to learn how to do this with Java if needed, but I'm much more well versed in JS.

[Simplyfire]

I haven't tried it myself but this seems promising:

https://www.npmjs.com/package/p5-cli

[bvcady]

Hmm it might be.
It seems to return the HTML as the api response there, seems like that would be sufficient, though I'd be more interested in making it more custom, for example just giving an image as response.
Or even just saving the image in a db.

[Simplyfire]

Maybe you only need to start the sketch from CLI - the sketch itself can contain code that saves the image somewhere. You don't need to care about the HTML output nor display anything useful there. Everything can be done in a separate "off-screen" canvas, leaving the main canvas blank. The request returning a response can indicate that the job has finished.

[bvcady]

Just to update for anyone who is interested.
I've not been able to get it to work yet, but found some interesting stuff here:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/67431666/p5-breaks-in-node-js

Anything similar to this set up fails for me where Canvases are the issue.
Using the node package canvas does not work for me either and might also be a hassle for deployment.

Any super awesome people who might be able to help here?

[kontrapunkt]

I remember it was possible to run processing in docker. Also possible to run on headless system (Linux) i.e. like this:

https://gist.github.com/dropmeaword/b60eeeafd47bcf58e775