link-preview-js
Advanced tools
Javascript module to extract and fetch HTTP link information from blocks of text.
npm i link-preview-js
Before creating an issue
It's more than likely there is nothing wrong with the library:
If you use this library and find it useful please consider sponsoring me, open source takes a lot of time and effort.
Allows you to extract information from an HTTP URL/link (or parse an HTML string) and retrieve meta information such as title, description, images, videos, etc. via OpenGraph tags.
google-bot or with Twitterbot), but you need to work around these issues yourself.getLinkPreview: you have to pass a string, doesn't matter if it is just a URL or a piece of text that contains a URL, the library will take care of parsing it and returning the info o the first valid HTTP(S) URL info it finds.
getPreviewFromContent: useful for passing a pre-fetched Response object from an existing async/etc. call. Refer to the example below for required object values.
import { getLinkPreview, getPreviewFromContent } from "link-preview-js";
// pass the link directly
getLinkPreview("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c").then((data) =>
console.debug(data)
);
////////////////////////// OR //////////////////////////
// pass a chunk of text
getLinkPreview(
"This is a text supposed to be parsed and the first link displayed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c"
).then((data) => console.debug(data));
////////////////////////// OR //////////////////////////
// pass a pre-fetched response object
// The passed response object should include, at minimum:
// {
// data: '<!DOCTYPE...><html>...', // response content
// headers: {
// ...
// // should include content-type
// content-type: "text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1",
// ...
// },
// url: 'https://domain.com/' // resolved url
// }
yourAjaxCall(url, (response) => {
getPreviewFromContent(response).then((data) => console.debug(data));
});
Additionally, you can pass an options object which should add more functionality to the parsing of the link
| Property Name | Result |
|---|---|
| imagesPropertyType (optional) (ex: 'og') | Fetches images only with the specified property, meta[property='${imagesPropertyType}:image'] |
| headers (optional) (ex: { 'user-agent': 'googlebot', 'Accept-Language': 'en-US' }) | Add request headers to fetch call |
| timeout (optional) (ex: 1000) | Timeout for the request to fail |
| followRedirects (optional) (default 'error') | For security reasons, the library does not automatically follow redirects ('error' value), a malicious agent can exploit redirects to steal data, posible values: ('error', 'follow', 'manual') |
| handleRedirects (optional) (with followRedirects 'manual') | When followRedirects is set to 'manual' you need to pass a function that validates if the redirectinon is secure, below you can find an example |
| resolveDNSHost (optional) | Function that resolves the final address of the detected/parsed URL to prevent SSRF attacks |
getLinkPreview("https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c", {
imagesPropertyType: "og", // fetches only open-graph images
headers: {
"user-agent": "googlebot", // fetches with googlebot crawler user agent
"Accept-Language": "fr-CA", // fetches site for French language
// ...other optional HTTP request headers
},
timeout: 1000
}).then(data => console.debug(data));
Doing requests on behalf of your users or using user-provided URLs is dangerous. One of such attack is trying to fetch a domain that redirects to localhost so the users get the contents of your server (doesn't affect mobile runtimes). To mitigate this attack you can use the resolveDNSHost option:
// example how to use node's dns resolver
const dns = require("node:dns");
getLinkPreview("http://maliciousLocalHostRedirection.com", {
resolveDNSHost: async (url: string) => {
return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
const hostname = new URL(url).hostname;
dns.lookup(hostname, (err, address, family) => {
if (err) {
reject(err);
return;
}
resolve(address); // if address resolves to localhost or '127.0.0.1' library will throw an error
});
});
},
}).catch((e) => {
// will throw a detected redirection to localhost
});
This might add some latency to your request but prevents loopback attacks.
Same to SSRF, following redirections is dangerous, the library errors by default when the response tries to redirect the user. There are however some simple redirections that are valid (e.g. HTTP to HTTPS) and you might want to allow them, you can do it via:
await getLinkPreview(`http://google.com/`, {
followRedirects: `manual`,
handleRedirects: (baseURL: string, forwardedURL: string) => {
const urlObj = new URL(baseURL);
const forwardedURLObj = new URL(forwardedURL);
if (
forwardedURLObj.hostname === urlObj.hostname ||
forwardedURLObj.hostname === "www." + urlObj.hostname ||
"www." + forwardedURLObj.hostname === urlObj.hostname
) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
},
});
Returns a Promise that resolves with an object describing the provided link. The info object returned varies depending on the content type (MIME type) returned in the HTTP response (see below for variations of response). Rejects with an error if the response can not be parsed or if there was no URL in the text provided.
{
url: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MejbOFk7H6c",
title: "OK Go - Needing/Getting - Official Video - YouTube",
siteName: "YouTube",
description: "Buy the video on iTunes: https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/needing-getting-bundle-ep/id508124847 See more about the guitars at: http://www.gretschguitars.com...",
images: ["https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MejbOFk7H6c/maxresdefault.jpg"],
mediaType: "video.other",
contentType: "text/html",
charset: "utf-8"
videos: [],
favicons:["https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_32-vflOogEID.png","https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_48-vflVjB_Qk.png","https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_96-vflW9Ec0w.png","https://www.youtube.com/yts/img/favicon_144-vfliLAfaB.png","https://s.ytimg.com/yts/img/favicon-vfl8qSV2F.ico"]
}
{
url: "https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2018/04/27/gettyimages-656523922nunes-4bb9a194ab2986834622983bb2f8fe57728a9e5f-s1100-c15.jpg",
mediaType: "image",
contentType: "image/jpeg",
favicons: [ "https://media.npr.org/favicon.ico" ]
}
{
url: "https://ondemand.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2007/12/20071231_atc_13.mp3",
mediaType: "audio",
contentType: "audio/mpeg",
favicons: [ "https://ondemand.npr.org/favicon.ico" ]
}
{
url: "https://www.w3schools.com/html/mov_bbb.mp4",
mediaType: "video",
contentType: "video/mp4",
favicons: [ "https://www.w3schools.com/favicon.ico" ]
}
{
url: "https://assets.curtmfg.com/masterlibrary/56282/installsheet/CME_56282_INS.pdf",
mediaType: "application",
contentType: "application/pdf",
favicons: [ "https://assets.curtmfg.com/favicon.ico" ]
}
MIT license
FAQs
Javascript module to extract and fetch HTTP link information from blocks of text.
The npm package link-preview-js receives a total of 99,830 weekly downloads. As such, link-preview-js popularity was classified as popular.
We found that link-preview-js demonstrated a healthy version release cadence and project activity because the last version was released less than a year ago. It has 0 open source maintainers collaborating on the project.
Did you know?
Socket for GitHub automatically highlights issues in each pull request and monitors the health of all your open source dependencies. Discover the contents of your packages and block harmful activity before you install or update your dependencies.
Research
Security News
Socket’s threat research team has detected six malicious npm packages typosquatting popular libraries to insert SSH backdoors.
Security News
MITRE's 2024 CWE Top 25 highlights critical software vulnerabilities like XSS, SQL Injection, and CSRF, reflecting shifts due to a refined ranking methodology.
Security News
In this segment of the Risky Business podcast, Feross Aboukhadijeh and Patrick Gray discuss the challenges of tracking malware discovered in open source softare.