Every blog post, product page, and profile in a Rails app deserves its own Open Graph image, the picture that shows up when someone shares the link on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Slack. The catch is that Ruby's options for generating those images are worse than the equivalents in the JavaScript and PHP worlds. There's no Satori, no first-class templating-to-image story, and the tools that do exist either make you place pixels by hand or run a headless browser next to Puma.
This post walks through the three realistic ways to do it in Rails, then builds out the one that keeps your view layer and your servers clean: rendering an ERB template to a PNG over HTTP, with caching and a background job so it never sits on the request path.
This is a cross-post of an article first published on html2img.com.
The three approaches
Approach
