API Site is gone?

[davidwparker]

http://avatars.adorable.io/
no longer exists.

Is the only way to use via self-hosting now?

[willcrisis]

+1 on this. I was using it on a project, and got surprised this afternoon when all my avatars stopped working.

As a workaround, I created a Firebase Functions version that can be self-hosted "for free" while we get some responses about what happened to it. This is the repo: https://github.com/willcrisis/adorable-avatars-cloud-functions

[ValentinVignal]

Hello, is there any news about this ? I am using your API in several projects too

[gfauchart]

I've hosted the project on this domain: https://api.hello-avatar.com/adorables/

it's the same API as before, feel free to use it!
https://api.hello-avatar.com/adorables/myseed
https://api.hello-avatar.com/adorables/120/myseed
https://api.hello-avatar.com/adorables/face/eyes2/nose2/mouth1/ff0000/120
https://api.hello-avatar.com/adorables/list

[rylnd]

Hey everyone,

I'm no longer a contributor on the project so I don't have any insight into the situation, but I felt the need to chime in and say 🙏 THANK YOU 🙏 to everyone for jumping in and building these solutions. It's really awesome and heartwarming to see people rally like this ❤️ .

Speaking historically: the avatars services was built to be a self-hosted dev tool, and the http://api.adorable.io/ instance was only ever intended to drive the demo page. But it was there, and public, and free, and so people started using it! We tried our best over the years to keep it up and performant, but the amount of traffic (and costs) kept rising, and I assume that trend has continued.

So, I love seeing these ad hoc solutions as (IMO) it's getting back to the original intention of the project! But if there are things that we (the community) can do to make this more distributable/deployable, I think that would benefit everyone.

[trptcolin]

Sorry for the sudden outage, and many thanks to those who have posted workarounds and alternative hosting!

This outage boils down to an issue of an expired credit card with Heroku, where it's hosted, and the Heroku account getting suspended due to unpaid bills.

In getting ready to update the CC, and considering the price tag (we're now at ~$280/month), I think this is a good seam for us to go ahead and shut down the free hosted API.

I know that it's annoying to have a dependency start failing on you like this with no warning, and I'm sorry for that. Unfortunately I think there's no great way to provide an advance warning here, since there are no accounts or anything - but I'm sure there are decent solutions we could brainstorm in hindsight.

In any case, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but I think your best option will be to self-host, or to point at an alternative hosted domain.

[aldrio]

Docker image for self hosters https://hub.docker.com/r/aldrio/adorable-avatars

[FlorianKoerner]

Very sad to see that the API is currently not available. I liked your avatar style.

I am the maintainer of DiceBear Avatars and can suggest this as an alternative as well.