Convert to it!

Truly universal online file converter.

Many online file conversion tools are boring and insecure. They only allow conversion between two formats in the same medium (images to images, videos to videos, etc.), and they require that you upload your files to some server.

This is not just terrible for privacy, it's also incredibly lame. What if you really need to convert an AVI video to a PDF document? Try to find an online tool for that, I dare you.

Convert.to.it aims to be a tool that "just works". You're almost guaranteed to get an output - perhaps not always the one you expected, but it'll try its best to not leave you hanging.

For a semi-technical overview of this tool, check out the video: https://youtu.be/btUbcsTbVA8

Usage

1. Go to convert.to.it
2. Click the big box to add your file (or just drag it on to the window).
3. An input format should have been automatically selected (as shown at the top). If not, yikes! Try pressing "Show all" and searching for it, or if it's really not there, see the "Issues" section below.
4. Press "Next" and select your output format.
5. Click Convert!
6. Hopefully, after a bit (or a lot) of thinking, the program will spit out the file you wanted. If not, see the "Issues" section below.

Issues

Ever since the YouTube video released, we've been getting spammed with issues suggesting the addition of all kinds of niche file formats. To keep things organized, I've decided to specify what counts as a valid issue and what doesn't.

[!IMPORTANT] SIMPLY ASKING FOR A FILE FORMAT TO BE ADDED IS NOT A MEANINGFUL ISSUE!

There are thousands of file formats out there. It can take hours to add support for just one. The math is simple - we can't possibly support every single file. As such, simply listing your favorite file formats is not helpful. We already know that there are formats we don't support, we don't need tickets to tell us that.

When suggesting a file format, you must at minimum:

• Make sure that there isn't already an issue about the same thing, and that we don't already support the format.
• Explain what you expect the conversion to be like (what medium is it converting to/from). It's important to note here that simply parsing the underlying data is not sufficient. Imagine if we only treated SVG images as raw XML data and didn't support converting them to raster images - that would defeat the point. In other words, try to avoid crude "waterfalls".
• Provide links to existing browser-based solutions if possible, or at the very least a reference for implementing the format, and make sure the license is compatible with GPL-2.0-or-later.

If this seems like a lot, please remember - a developer will have to do 100x more work to actually implement the format. Doing a bit of research not only saves them precious time, it also weeds out "unserious" proposals that would only bloat our to-do list.

If you're submitting a bug report, you only need to do step 1 - check if the problem isn't already reported by someone else. Bug reports are generally quite important otherwise.

Though please note, "converting X to Y doesn't work" is not a bug report. However, "converting X to Y works but not how I expected" likely is a bug report.

Deployment

Local development (Bun + Vite)

1. Clone this repository with git clone https://github.com/p2r3/convert.
2. Install Bun.
3. Run bun install to install dependencies.
4. Run bun run dev to prepare and start the development server.

The following steps are optional, but recommended for performance:

When you first open the page, it'll take a while to generate the list of supported formats for each tool. If you open the console, you'll see it complaining a bunch about missing caches.

You can generate this list beforehand and save it into dist/ by running bun run cache:build after bun run build. If you run into issues where your changes seem to not be applying, try deleting dist/cache.json.

Docker (prebuilt image)

Docker compose files live in the docker/ directory, so run compose with -f from the repository root:

docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml up -d

Alternatively download the docker-compose.yml separately and start it by executing docker compose up -d in the same directory.

This runs the container on http://localhost:8080/convert/.

Docker (local build for development)

Use the override file to build the image locally:

docker compose -f docker/docker-compose.yml -f docker/docker-compose.override.yml up --build -d

The first Docker build is expected to be slow because Chromium and related system packages are installed in the build stage (needed for puppeteer in buildCache.js). Later builds are usually much faster due to Docker layer caching.

Manual

Run bun run build and then bun run cache:build. Then serve the dist/ folder on any HTTP server of your choice.

Contributing

The best way to contribute is by adding support for new file formats (duh). If you don't have a format to add but are eager to help, take a look at our issues. There are plenty of suggestions there.

Here's how adding a format works works:

Creating a handler

Each "tool" used for conversion has to be normalized to a standard form - effectively a "wrapper" that abstracts away the internal processes. These wrappers are available in src/handlers.

Below is a super barebones handler that does absolutely nothing. You can use this as a starting point for adding a new format:

This is the beginning of the README. Read the rest at the original. Read the full README ↗