Note: We are using apk add because at the top, we chose the node:16-alpineversion of node (which is smaller in size). RUN apk update RUN apk add RUN apk add ffmpeg So, the 3 lines in the middle install the FFmpeg inside your Node.js Alpine base image. On top of your base image, you will run the commands for installing FFmpeg and that’s it!īelow is a working Dockerfile that does the trick. The easier approach is to bundle your application with FFmpeg installed inside a Docker image which makes it really easy to distribute and your application is now sharable and reproducible!īut how exactly do you do that? It's really simple. Which is repetitive and boring right? The Solution

Because whenever you need a new server, you will need to install it again. So, to resolve the problem, one easy solution is to install FFmpeg on the server where you are running your application.īut in modern days, we hardly directly use the hardware. There are some libraries on top of the FFmpeg like ffcreator and fluent-ffmpeg which create an abstraction on top of FFmpeg but you will still need FFmpeg installed on the OS level. The problem is FFmpeg is not any npm module that you can just install and use.

Long story short, if you need to work with audio and video conversion or modification, you will need this. One good example of this is FFmpeg which is described in their documentation as:Ī complete, cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video.

However, for some specific use cases, we need to access the OS-level applications which makes it a little bit complicated. Usually, when we are running a Node.js application, all of the required parts for that application are inside the npm packages which go inside the node_modules folder. Today we will learn how we can use FFmpeg with Node.js inside a Docker container.

Scaling ffmpeg nodejs