Document a way to install libvips without the dependecy hell

[cypherbits]

Hello,

This is a great project with an awesome performance but I think it is not used by many project just for the dependency hell when you want to install and use it.

When you go to install libvips on a Debian/Ubuntu you get about 1GB of dependencies (even Firefox or Xorg). This is wrong for containers and modern deployments.

Is there at least a documented way to compile, install and configure PHP to use libVIPS? Could you provide a precompiled .so?

Thanks.

[jcupitt]

Hi @cypherbits,

Yes, the debian libvips package is extremely heavy by default. It recommends the libvips GUI, and that in turn pulls in a lot of other stuff.

Try:

sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends libvips42

It's "only" a 35mb download. You can make it a bit smaller by building your own libvips and only enabling the formats you need (wasm-vips is under 4mb), but I imagine many people will not want to do that.

[cypherbits]

Hi, tried that and downloaded about 15MB with 75MB of disk storage. That is much better than the 1GB from before.
Many thanks! This should be documented right on the readme!

[jcupitt]

It's a standard Debian thing, but you're right perhaps not everyone knows. I'll add a note.

Thanks for suggesting this!