Installing image-to-ascii and graphicsmagick for use with a Node.js

Join me as I walk you through the process of installing a Node.js module and the image processing system that it uses to create amazing ASCII art as featured in the cover image of this story.

Don’t have Node.js? I created a screencast / video that detailed the steps to install it on an OS X system. Check it out, I was up and running in under a minute!

Installing Node.js on OS X

Before and After Pictures

You know how much I love before and after shots! — Author [ Micah]’s Mom (No seriously)

Here is a photo of my adorable 100 Lbs.dog Griffin! Whom I’ll use in the before and after pics. Enjoy =’)

Before

After

Here’s a quick summary of install steps, the exact commands that I ran on OS X are as follows: ( I think there is a correction i need to do )

567 mkdir ~/image-to-ascii
568 cd ~/image-to-ascii/
569 brew update
570 brew install graphicsmagick
571 npm i --save image-to-ascii

The above steps do do the following in more detail:

Open a new Terminal and create a directory that will house this project by running the command:

mkdir image-to-ascii

Enter the new directory by running:

cd image-to-ascii

Update the brew installer:

brew update

Use brew to install the image processing system

brew install graphicsmagick

Use npm to install the Node.js image-to-ascii module:

npm i --save image-to-ascii

Awesome job! Here’s a pat on your back, you should now have one of the best image to ASII processing systems know to man kind installed.’

You might be asking yourself. “How do I use it? I’n my next cover the steps to get the example code running.

How to run the example code provided by image-to-ascii

Here is a link to the module’s github repo with a Readme that I used to get up and running. Go buy him a book, if you like what you see.