Node.js SDK

The Cloudinary Node.js SDK provides simple, yet comprehensive image and video upload, transformation, optimization, and delivery capabilities through the Cloudinary APIs, that you can implement using code that integrates seamlessly with your existing Node.js application.

How would you like to learn?

Resource	Description
Node.js quick start	Get up and running in five minutes with a walk through of installation, configuration, upload, management and transformations.
Video tutorials	Watch tutorials relevant to your use cases, from getting started with the Node.js SDK, to uploading, transforming and analyzing your images and videos.
Cloudinary Node.js SDK GitHub repo	Explore the source code and see the CHANGELOG for details on all new features and fixes from previous versions.
	Try the free Introduction to Cloudinary for Node.js Developers online course, where you can learn how to upload, manage, transform and optimize your digital assets.

Install

Cloudinary's Node.js integration library is available as an open-source NPM package. To install the library, run:

Configure

Include Cloudinary's Node.js classes in your code:

Set required configuration parameters

You can set the required configuration parameters, cloud_name, api_key and api_secret either using the CLOUDINARY_URL environment variable, or using the config method in your code.

To define the CLOUDINARY_URL environment variable:

1. Copy the API environment variable format from the API Keys page of the Cloudinary Console Settings.
2. Replace <your_api_key> and <your_api_secret> with your actual values. Your cloud name is already correctly included in the format.

For example:

Alternatively, you can use the config method to set your cloud_name, api_key and api_secret, for example:

Set additional configuration parameters

In addition to the required configuration parameters, you can define a number of optional configuration parameters if relevant.

You can append configuration parameters, for example upload_prefix and secure_distribution, to the environment variable:

Or you can use the config method in your code, for example:

Configuration video tutorials

If you've had trouble with any of the above steps, you may find these video tutorials helpful:

See more Node.js video tutorials.

Use

Once you've installed and configured the Node.js SDK, you can use it for:

• Uploading files to your product environment: You can upload any files, not only images and videos, set your own naming conventions and overwrite policies, moderate and tag your assets on upload, and much more.
• Transforming and optimizing images and videos: Keeping your original assets intact in your product environment, you can deliver different versions of your media - different sizes, formats, with effects and overlays, customized for your needs.
• Managing assets: Using methods from the Admin and Upload APIs, you can organize your assets, for example, list, rename and delete them, add tags and metadata and use advanced search capabilities.

Quick example: File upload

The following Node.js code uploads the dog.mp4 video using the public_id, my_dog. The video will overwrite the existing my_dog video if it exists. When the video upload is complete, the specified notification URL will receive details about the uploaded media asset.

Quick example: Transform and optimize

Take a look at the following transformation code and the image it delivers:

This relatively simple code performs all of the following on the original front_face.jpg image before delivering it:

• Convert and deliver the image in PNG format (the originally uploaded image was a JPG)
• Crop to a 150x150 thumbnail using face-detection gravity to automatically determine the location for the crop
• Round the corners with a 20 pixel radius
• Apply a sepia effect
• Overlay the Cloudinary logo on the southeast corner of the image (with a slight offset). The logo is scaled down to a 50 pixel width, with increased brightness and partial transparency (opacity = 60%)
• Rotate the resulting image (including the overlay) by 10 degrees
• Optimize the image to reduce the size of the image without impacting visual quality.

And here's the URL that would be included in the image tag that's automatically generated from the above code:

In a similar way, you can transform a video.

Quick example: Get details of a single asset

The following Node.js example uses the Admin API resource method to return details of the image with public ID cld-sample:

Sample output:

Sample projects

For additional useful code samples and to learn how to integrate Cloudinary with your Node.js applications, take a look at our sample projects on GitHub.

• Basic Node.js sample: Uploading local and remote images to Cloudinary and generating various transformation URLs.
• Node.js Photo Album: A fully working web application that allows you to upload photos, maintain a database with references, list images with their metadata, and display them using various cloud-based transformations. Image uploading is performed both from the server side and directly from the browser using a jQuery plugin.