Introducing Better Media 1.0
Today we're shipping the first stable release of Better Media — a modular, storage-agnostic media pipeline for modern backends.
After months of internal use and iteration, we're ready to call it stable. Better Media 1.0 is a production-ready media toolkit you can drop into any Node.js backend — Express, Next.js, NestJS, or anything else.
What is Better Media?
Better Media is a framework-agnostic library for handling file uploads, storage, and processing in Node.js backends. It handles the boring parts — multipart parsing, presigned URLs, virus scanning, image transformation — so you can focus on your product.
import { createBetterMedia } from "@better-media/framework";
import { s3Adapter } from "@better-media/adapter-s3";
const media = createBetterMedia({
storage: s3Adapter({
bucket: process.env.S3_BUCKET!,
region: "us-east-1",
}),
});That's all you need to get started. The adapter handles the rest.
What's in 1.0
- Storage adapters — S3, Google Cloud Storage, filesystem, and in-memory (for tests)
- Database adapters — MongoDB and PostgreSQL for tracking upload metadata
- Plugin system — composable plugins for validation, image processing, and virus scanning
- Presigned URLs — secure direct-to-storage uploads without your server as a proxy
- Type-safe — full TypeScript support with inferred types from your configuration
Why we built it
Every project we worked on needed the same thing: a reliable way to handle user uploads with validation, storage, and metadata tracking. We kept copying the same code between projects. Better Media is what we wish had existed.
Package overview
What's next
Version 1.1 is already in progress. We're working on:
- Video transcoding plugin
- Cloudflare R2 adapter
- Webhook support for async processing
Follow the changelog for updates, or star the project on GitHub.