A fast and efficient favicon fetching service built in Rust. GetIcon provides a simple HTTP API to retrieve favicons from any website, with built-in caching and performance optimizations.

• 🚀 Simple REST API endpoints for both image and JSON responses
• 📦 Server-side caching for consistent results
• 🔄 ETag support for efficient client-side caching
• ⚡ HTTP cache headers for improved performance
• 🌐 Support for any website's favicon.ico
• 📄 Built-in HTML documentation page
• 🔍 Smart icon selection with size parameter support
• 📱 Detection of multiple icon types (favicon.ico, Apple Touch, Web App Manifest)
• 🔄 Docker support for easy deployment
• 📊 Sentry integration for error monitoring (optional)

1. Ensure you have Rust installed (1.75.0 or later)
2. Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/yourusername/geticon.git
cd geticon

3. Build and run:

cargo run

The server will start at http://localhost:8080

1. Pull the Docker image:

docker pull ghcr.io/snapbooks-app/geticon:latest

2. Run the container:

docker run -p 8080:8080 ghcr.io/snapbooks-app/geticon:latest

Or use Docker Compose:

# docker-compose.yml
version: '3'
services:
  geticon:
    image: ghcr.io/snapbooks-app/geticon:latest
    ports:
      - "8080:8080"
    environment:
      - RUST_LOG=info  # Controls log level
      - SENTRY_DSN=your_sentry_dsn  # Optional
      - SENTRY_ENVIRONMENT=production  # Optional

Then run:

docker-compose up -d

GetIcon is in production use at snapbooks.no.

GET /img?url={website-url}

Optional: Specify size with the size parameter:

GET /img?url={website-url}&size={size}

GET /json?url={website-url}

Optional: Specify size with the size parameter:

GET /json?url={website-url}&size={size}

GET /health

Returns a JSON response with service status information.

To fetch GitHub's favicon as an image:

GET http://localhost:8080/img?url=github.com

To fetch Microsoft's favicon at 192px size:

GET http://localhost:8080/img?url=microsoft.com&size=192

To get JSON information about Google's favicon:

GET http://localhost:8080/json?url=google.com

• Success: Returns the favicon with appropriate content type (image/png, image/x-icon, etc.)
• Not Found: Returns 404 if favicon doesn't exist
• Not Modified: Returns 304 if favicon hasn't changed (when using ETag)

Returns a JSON object with:

• url: The normalized URL
• icons: Array of all detected icons with their properties
• best_icon: The selected best icon based on scoring algorithm

GetIcon implements efficient caching through:

• Server-side in-memory cache with 2-hour TTL
• Consistent icon selection for the same URL and size
• ETag headers for client-side caching
• Cache-Control headers with a 2-hour max age
• 304 Not Modified responses when content hasn't changed

GetIcon searches for icons in multiple locations:

• Standard favicon.ico in site root
• HTML link tags with rel="icon", "shortcut icon", etc.
• Apple Touch icons
• Web App Manifest icons
• Microsoft Tile images
• Open Graph images (as fallback)

GetIcon uses device-specific User-Agent strings to improve compatibility with websites that implement strict security measures:

• Apple Touch Icons: iOS/Safari User-Agent
• Android/Maskable Icons: Android/Chrome User-Agent
• Microsoft Tile Images: Windows/Edge User-Agent
• Standard Icons: Windows/Chrome User-Agent

The User-Agent strings are periodically updated from useragents.me to ensure they remain current and effective.

To keep the service working optimally with all websites, the User-Agent strings should be updated periodically (recommended: every 3-6 months) by checking the latest common User-Agents at useragents.me.

The following environment variables can be configured:

Built with:

• Rust
• Actix-web framework for the HTTP server
• reqwest for HTTP requests
• scraper for HTML parsing
• serde for JSON serialization
• md5 for ETag generation
• moka for high-performance in-memory caching
• log and env_logger for structured logging
• sentry for error monitoring

See LICENSE file for details.