WARNING: This was a demo hastily prepared for the initial release of WebAssembly on Workers. This code is not designed to be production-quality, and tooling has improved considerably since this code was written. We do NOT recommend using this code as a template for your own applications; it may be useful for educational purposes. For the latest best practices on using Wasm on Workers, see documentation on building Rust-Wasm workers with Wrangler. If you're looking for image resizing specifically, consider using Cloudflare Image Resizing.

Cloudflare Workers WebAssembly Demo

This repository implements image resizing that runs on Cloudflare's edge network using WebAssembly in a Cloudflare Worker.

For this demo, we sought to minimize the dependencies of the WASM code, so that we could completely avoid the need for a C standard library. A more practical approach to building WASM applications would be to use Emscripten to provide a working library. However, as of this writing, Emscripten still needs some tweaks to correctly target Cloudflare Workers.

In order to minimize dependencies, we implement image encoding, decoding, and resizing using the stb library.

What's in this repository

  • main.c -- The C code to be complied to WebAssembly.
  • stb -- Git submodule pointing to the stb library, which provides single-file implementations of image-handling operations.
  • bootstrap.h -- Minimal implementation of C library functions needed by stb.
  • stubs -- Fake, empty C header files, just to satisfy the #includes in stb.
  • worker.js -- Cloudflare Worker JavaScript that loads and runs the WASM.
  • worker-metadata.json -- Used when uploading the worker via the API, to bind the worker to the WASM. Not needed when uploading via the UI.

How to build

  1. Install Clang >= 8.0.0
  2. make

How to deploy

Via the UI:

  1. Create a script in the "Workers" tab of the Cloudflare dashboard.
  2. Copy the contents of worker.js into the script editor.
  3. Click on Resources at the top of the script editor.
  4. Create a WebAssembly binding named RESIZER_WASM.
  5. Upload resizer.wasm to this binding.
  6. Save the script.
  7. Create a route where your script will run.
  8. Now any image file under that route will accept a ?width= query parameter to downscale the image.

Via the API -- free/pro/biz (single-script) users -- THIS WILL REPLACE YOUR EXISTING SCRIPT:

curl -X PUT -H "X-Auth-Email: $API_EMAIL" -H "X-Auth-Key: $API_KEY" \
      "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/zones/$ZONE_ID/workers/script" \
	    -F metadata=@worker-metadata.json \
	    -F script=@worker.js \
	    -F wasm=@resizer.wasm

Via the API -- enterprise (multi-script) users -- creates a script named "wasm-demo":

curl -X PUT -H "X-Auth-Email: $API_EMAIL" -H "X-Auth-Key: $API_KEY" \
      "https://api.cloudflare.com/client/v4/accounts/$ACCOUNT_ID/workers/scripts/wasm-demo" \
	    -F metadata=@worker-metadata.json \
	    -F script=@worker.js \
	    -F wasm=@resizer.wasm