Install imgdiet with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• imgdiet

Project history

The SourceHut repository uses trunk as its default branch and publishes signed-off patch workflow instructions, mailing lists, and a SourceHut issue tracker. The GitHub mirror was created in June 2023, while SourceHut refs show 0.1.x tags in 2023, 0.2.0 in October 2024, and 1.0.0 in January 2026.

The README describes imgdiet as a Go module built on libvips. Go package documentation describes it as high-performance image resizing, format conversion, and compression optimized for web delivery, with explicit libvips initialization and shutdown calls.

Adoption history

The project is relatively small: Go package documentation reports no importers for the module page inspected, and Homebrew formula analytics show modest install counts. That makes it an obscure but concrete package rather than a broad ecosystem standard.

Its adoption path is split between Go developers using go get and Homebrew users installing the command-line package. The Homebrew formula depends on vips, glib, and gettext, which mirrors the project's reliance on libvips rather than implementing image codecs itself.

How it is used

Library users initialize libvips, open an image from an io.Reader, export to a target format such as WebP, and inspect bytes saved. The documented API emphasizes repeated exports from original image data, so one decoded source can produce WebP, AVIF, JPEG, or other outputs.

The package belongs in web asset pipelines, small Go services, and local optimization scripts where libvips performance is desired without directly binding to the whole libvips surface.

Why package nerds care

imgdiet is package-nerd notable mostly as a tidy wrapper around a native image-processing dependency. The interesting packaging work is making Go, libvips, and Homebrew cooperate so users get fast image optimization without writing C bindings themselves.

Because sources are thin and adoption is small, its historical significance is limited; the useful record is its SourceHut-native workflow, libvips dependency, and 2023-to-2026 tag progression.

Timeline

• 2023: SourceHut refs show 0.1.0, 0.1.1, and 0.1.2 tags.
• 2024: SourceHut refs show v0.2.0.
• 2026: SourceHut refs show v1.0.0; Go package documentation for v1.0.0 is published in January 2026.

Related projects

• libvips is the native image-processing library named by the README and Go package documentation.
• vipsgen is listed in go.mod and supplies Go bindings used by the project.
• Homebrew packages imgdiet with vips, glib, and gettext dependencies.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/jamesponddotco/imgdiet-go
• https://formulae.brew.sh/api/formula/imgdiet.json
• https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/imgdiet-go
• https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/imgdiet-go/blob/trunk/README.md
• https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/imgdiet-go/refs
• https://pkg.go.dev/git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/imgdiet-go