HEIF/HEIC support seems broken

[davidcelis]

I've been trying to get HEIC/HEIF images working in both your buildpack as well as https://github.com/hardpixel/heroku-buildpack-vips, but to no avail. I noticed you opened libvips/libvips#1945 at one point but, presumably, you then got libheif working properly with Vips? Does it still work for you by any chance? I was trying to debug this in both buildpacks but couldn't figure it out. The other buildpack wasn't reporting any helpful info (aside from libheif being installed and listed places like vips --vips-config and vips -l. However, when I tried the same commands with your buildpack, I actually do get a warning about the heif module when trying to run any vips command. For example:

$ dokku run vips --vips-config

(process:13): VIPS-WARNING **: 18:51:11.173: unable to load "/app/vendor/vips/lib/vips-modules-8.14/vips-heif.so" -- libheif.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
enable debug: false
enable deprecated: true
enable modules: true
enable cplusplus: true
enable RAD load/save: true
enable Analyze7 load/save: true
enable PPM load/save: true
enable GIF load: true
use fftw for FFTs: true
accelerate loops with ORC: true
ICC profile support with lcms: true
zlib: true
text rendering with pangocairo: true
font file support with fontconfig: true
EXIF metadata support with libexif: true
JPEG load/save with libjpeg: true
JXL load/save with libjxl: false (dynamic module: false)
JPEG2000 load/save with OpenJPEG: false
PNG load/save with libspng: true
PNG load/save with libpng: false
selected quantisation package: imagequant
TIFF load/save with libtiff: true
image pyramid save with libgsf: true
HEIC/AVIF load/save with libheif: true (dynamic module: true)
WebP load/save with libwebp: true
PDF load with PDFium: true
PDF load with poppler-glib: false (dynamic module: false)
SVG load with librsvg: true
EXR load with OpenEXR: true
OpenSlide load: false (dynamic module: false)
Matlab load with libmatio: false
NIfTI load/save with niftiio: false
FITS load/save with cfitsio: false
GIF save with cgif: true
selected Magick package: MagickCore (dynamic module: true)
Magick API version: magick6
Magick load: true
Magick save: true

Did something maybe change in your Dockerfile after you originally added Vips support? I can reproduce these errors in a fresh Rails application simply by adding ruby-vips to the Gemfile and then adding your buildpack to index 1 before pushing to my Dokku server.

[davidcelis]

Ahh, so I guess that that VIPS-WARNING load error was because I didn't add the apt buildpack with an Aptfile containing libheif-dev. Once I did that, the load error went away and vips -l correctly lists VipsForeignLoadHeif and VipsForeignSaveHeif. I think I had assumed that the Aptfile was no longer necessary because I saw libheif-related build items in the main Dockerfile now.

However, even after adding the Aptfile and installing libheif-dev manually, opening up a Rails console and running Vips.get_suffixes returns a list that doesn't contain .heif or .heic, so I get the same VipsForeignLoad error you described in your original issue on the libvips repo.

[brandoncc]

Thanks for reporting this. I did recently change the way libvips is built, which changed the build of libheif from a static library to a shared library. It seemed like this worked fine in my testing, but maybe I missed something. If you would like to test the buildpack before my changes, you can add the buildpack to an app using the URL:

https://github.com/brandoncc/heroku-buildpack-vips#154584a37ef2ab945de5156bd54de7267c327ea2

I would love to know if this resolves your issue, if you would be willing to test.

[jcupitt]

$ dokku run vips --vips-config

(process:13): VIPS-WARNING **: 18:51:11.173: unable to load "/app/vendor/vips/lib/vips-modules-8.14/vips-heif.so" -- libheif.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

By default, libvips compiles the heif loader and saver as a plugin (or module). This is supposed to make it easy to add and remove formats at runtime.

So ... libvips is trying to load the vips module /app/vendor/vips/lib/vips-modules-8.14/vips-heif.so, and in turn that is trying to load libheif.so.1, the libheif library, and failing.

I would check where libheif.so.1 is on your system, then check that that directory is on your library search path. Maybe running ldconfig would be enough?

The build dockerfile has:

ARG HEIF_VERSION=1.10.0
ARG HEIF_URL=https://github.com/strukturag/libheif/releases/download

RUN wget ${HEIF_URL}/v${HEIF_VERSION}/libheif-${HEIF_VERSION}.tar.gz \
  && tar xf libheif-${HEIF_VERSION}.tar.gz \
  && cd libheif-${HEIF_VERSION} \
  && ./configure --prefix=$VIPS_PREFIX \
  && make V=0 \
  && make install

Should that be ./configure --prefix=$PREFIX? I'm probably missing something.

You could also remove the examples and pixbuf support, eg.:

./configure --prefix=$PREFIX --disable-examples --disable-go --disable-gdk-pixbuf

[davidcelis]

@brandoncc Specifying that SHA did indeed work 🎉 Weirdly enough, Vips.get_suffixes still wasn't listing .heic and .heif, but I was able to load an HEIC file despite that. Still, the surprising get_suffixes behavior lead me to test the latest ref one last time just to be sure and it does raise the VipsForeignLoad, so it does seem that the shared library changes are at play.

@jcupitt thanks for your insights (and sorry about also opening that issue in the ruby-vips repo; i just honestly wasn't sure where the problem was 😓 I think you're probably right about the prefix being wrong! $VIPS_PREFIX doesn't seem to be set anywhere so I'm building a new version of the buildpack with that change and can report back once I've tested it out.

[davidcelis]

Well, maybe not that simple… Changing $VIPS_PREFIX to $PREFIX caused Vips to fail to build and test: https://gist.github.com/davidcelis/c658f1c7f3b3735429b22dbcb6c73b17

[brandoncc]

Thank you both for the further debugging. I suspect it is the variable rename that I missed when I reworked the Dockerfile as part of making this buildpack successfully build libvips 8.14.x. I have opened a PR with the fix.

@davidcelis Can you try with commit hash 3af8c48b1b1935087c3775940247663123fae459 and let me know if that resolves your issue?

[davidcelis]

@brandoncc No dice 😓 I added https://github.com/brandoncc/heroku-buildpack-vips#3af8c48b1b1935087c3775940247663123fae459 but still get the VipsForeignLoad error.

[brandoncc]

Thanks for trying, I'll see what else I can figure out using John's advice above.

[brandoncc]

The test I used before I released the 8.14 update with the new build process was from John's comment here. I do:

wget http://www.rollthepotato.net/~john/demo.heic
vips copy demo.heic x.jpg

This test still works fine, no errors.

I couldn't identify the x.jpg file signature using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_file_signatures, but I can tell that the bytes are changing by using:

~ $ head -c 20 demo.heic
$ftypheicmif1

~ $ head -c 20 x.jpg
����:ExifMM

When I run the lines below, however, I do get an error:

~ $ bin/rails c

Loading production environment (Rails 7.0.7.2)
irb(main):001:0> Vips::Image.new_from_file('demo.heic')
/app/vendor/bundle/ruby/3.2.0/gems/ruby-vips-2.1.4/lib/vips/image.rb:281:in `new_from_file': VipsForeignLoad: "demo.heic" is not a known file format (Vips::Error)

I can load the copied x.jpg file fine, though:

irb(main):002:0> Vips::Image.new_from_file('x.jpg')
=> #<Image 3024x4032 uchar, 3 bands, srgb>

It seems like the cli vips binary can work with heif files just fine, but ruby-vips is not picking up on the libheif library for some reason. I don't currently have any idea why this would be.

[davidcelis]

@brandoncc Your test went the same way for me.

@jcupitt Any insight here? Why would the vips CLI tool seem to be able to read/convert HEIC files but not the ruby bindings?

[davidcelis]

@brandoncc Actually, scratch that; I might've had a previous version of the buildpack still loaded 😓 Trying your test resulted in a VipsForeignLoad error for me:

$ wget http://www.rollthepotato.net/~john/demo.heic -o tmp/demo.heic
$ vips copy tmp/demo.heic tmp/x.jpg
VipsForeignLoad: "tmp/demo.heic" is not a known file format

Also, I also wanted to bring up a question from earlier again, just in case you'd missed it:

so I guess that that VIPS-WARNING load error was because I didn't add the apt buildpack with an Aptfile containing libheif-dev. Once I did that, the load error went away and vips -l correctly lists VipsForeignLoadHeif and VipsForeignSaveHeif. I think I had assumed that the Aptfile was no longer necessary because I saw libheif-related build items in the main Dockerfile now.

Given that this buildpack is attempting to build libheif itself, is sticking libheif-dev in an Aptfile still supposed to be necessary? It seems surprising, but maybe I just don't understand the difference between the buildpack compiling and installing libheif vs. installing libheif-dev via apt (or the interaction between the two).

[brandoncc]

@davidcelis how weird! My test was on a brand new Rails app with only the Ruby and livbips buildpacks...although I might have also had the apt community buildpack. If so, the content of Aptfile I would have been using is:

libglib2.0-0
libglib2.0-dev
libpoppler-glib8

As for your other question, I don't know unfortunately. I don't know very much about these build systems. In fact, John helped me get the very first iteration of this buildpack working because I wasn't able to from the start. I won't have any free time to look at this for the next two weeks. If you figure anything out in the meantime, I'd be happy to merge a fix sooner than that.