Magika TypeScript/JavaScript library

Magika is a novel AI-powered file type detection tool that relies on the recent advance of deep learning to provide accurate detection. Under the hood, Magika employs a custom, highly optimized model that only weighs about a few MBs, and enables precise file identification within milliseconds, even when running on a single CPU. Magika has been trained and evaluated on a dataset of ~100M samples across 200+ content types (covering both binary and textual file formats), and it achieves an average ~99% accuracy on our test set.

This npm package allows you to run Magika in the browser or in Node!

Magika on GitHub: https://github.com/google/magika.

Installing MagikaJS

npm install magika

Using MagikaJS

Simple usage in Node:

import { readFile } from "fs/promises";
import { MagikaNode as Magika } from "magika/node";

const data = await readFile("some file");
const magika = await Magika().create();
const prediction = await magika.identifyBytes(data);
console.log(prediction);

Simple usage in the browser:

import { Magika } from "magika";

const file = new File(["# Hello I am a markdown file"], "hello.md");
const fileBytes = new Uint8Array(await file.arrayBuffer());
const magika = await Magika.create();
const prediction = await magika.identifyBytes(fileBytes);
console.log(prediction);

For more, see our documentation.

Command-line tool

Please use the official CLI (with pip install magika) as it can perform batch processing and search for files recursively. Read more about that in the main README. This one is useful to load the TensorflowJS model and see that it works as expected.

Install it with npm install -g magika. You can then run it by executing magika-js <some files>

Usage: magika-js [options] <paths...>

Magika JS - file type detection with ML. https://google.github.io/magika

Arguments:
  paths                                    Paths of the files to detect

Options:
  --json-output                            Format output in JSON
  --model-url <model-url>                  Model URL (default: "https://google.github.io/magika/models/standard_v3_2/model.json")
  --model-path <model-path>                Modle file path
  --model-config-url <model-config-url>    Model config URL (default: "https://google.github.io/magika/models/standard_v3_2/config.min.json")
  --model-config-path <model-config-path>  Model config file path
  --by-stream                              Identify file via stream, not via bytes
  --debug                                  Output debug information
  -h, --help                               display help for command

Reporting errors in detections

Please open an issue on Github.

Citation

If you use this software for your research, please cite it as:

@InProceedings{fratantonio25:magika,
  author = {Yanick Fratantonio and Luca Invernizzi and Loua Farah and Kurt Thomas and Marina Zhang and Ange Albertini and Francois Galilee and Giancarlo Metitieri and Julien Cretin and Alexandre Petit-Bianco and David Tao and Elie Bursztein},
  title = {{Magika: AI-Powered Content-Type Detection}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE)},
  month = {April},
  year = {2025}
}

Loading the model and configuration

MagikaJS is designed to be flexible in how you provide the model and configuration file to it.

Both the Node and browser versions accept URLs to asyncronously load these two assets.

const magika = await magika.create({
  modelURL: "https://...",
  configURL: "https://...",
});

The Node version also allows to load local files.

const magika = await magika.create({
  modelPath: "./assets/...",
  configPath: "./assets/...",
});

Development

Using the model hosted On Github:

yarn install
yarn run build
yarn run bin -- README.md

Using the local model:

yarn install
yarn run build
(cd ../website; yarn install; yarn run dev) &
yarn run bin --model-url http://localhost:5173/magika/model/model.json --config-url http://localhost:5173/magika/model/config.json ../tests_data/basic/*

Using the local magika package when developing the website:

yarn install
yarn run build
yarn link
(cd ../website; yarn link magika; yarn install; yarn run dev) &

Testing

Execute:

yarn install
yarn run build
yarn run test