Lotus::Assets

Assets management for Ruby web projects

Status

Contact

Home page: http://lotusrb.org
Community: http://lotusrb.org/community
Guides: http://lotusrb.org/guides
Mailing List: http://lotusrb.org/mailing-list
API Doc: http://rdoc.info/gems/lotus-assets
Bugs/Issues: https://github.com/lotus/assets/issues
Support: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/lotus-ruby
Forum: https://discuss.lotusrb.org
Chat: http://chat.lotusrb.org

Rubies

Lotus::Assets supports Ruby (MRI) 2+

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'lotus-assets'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install lotus-assets

Usage

Helpers

The framework offers assets specific helpers to be used in templates. They resolve one or multiple sources into corresponding HTML tags. Those sources can be the name of the local asset or an absolute URL.

Given the following template:

<!doctype HTML>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Assets example</title>
    <%= stylesheet 'reset', 'grid', 'main' %>
  </head>

  <body>
  <!-- ... -->
  <%= javascript 'https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.min.js', 'application' %>
  <%= javascript 'modals' %>
  </body>
</html>

It will output this markup.

<!doctype HTML>
<html>
  <head>
    <title>Assets example</title>
    <link href="/assets/reset.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
    <link href="/assets/grid.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
    <link href="/assets/main.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet">
  </head>

  <body>
  <!-- ... -->
  <script src="https://code.jquery.com/jquery-2.1.1.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  <script src="/assets/application.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  <script src="/assets/modals.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
  </body>
</html>

Let's have a look at the corresponding Ruby code. In this example we use ERb, but remember that Lotus::Assets is compatible with all the rendering engines such as HAML, Slim, Mustache, etc..

require 'erb'
require 'lotus/assets'
require 'lotus/assets/helpers'

class View
  include Lotus::Assets::Helpers

  def initialize
    @template = File.read('template.erb')
    @engine   = ERB.new(@template)
  end

  def render
    @engine.result(binding)
  end
end

View.new.render # => HTML markup

For advanced configurations, please have a look at Lotus::Assets::Configuration.

Available Helpers

This gems ships with the following helpers:

javascript
stylesheet
favicon
image
video
audio
asset_path
asset_url

Development mode

Lotus::Assets can help you during the development process of your application. It can manage multiple source directories for each asset type or run a preprocessor for you.

Sources

Imagine to have your application's javascripts under app/assets/javascripts and that those assets depends on a vendored version of jQuery.

require 'lotus/assets'

Lotus::Assets.configure do
  compile true

  sources << [
    'app/assets',
    'vendor/jquery'
  ]
end

When from a template you do:

<%= javascript 'jquery', 'jquery-ui', 'login' %>

Lotus::Assets looks at the defined sources and lazily copies those files under public/assets (by default), before the markup is generated.

Your public directory will have the following structure.

% tree public
public/
└── assets
    ├── jquery.js
    ├── jquery-ui.js
    └── login.js

Please remember that sources are recursively looked up in order of declaration.

If in the example above we had a jquery.js under app/assets/javascripts/**/*.js that file would be copied into the public directory instead of the one under vendor/jquery. The reason is because we declared app/assets/javascripts first.

Preprocessors

Lotus::Assets is able to run assets preprocessors and lazily compile them under public/assets (by default), before the markup is generated.

Imagine to have main.css.scss under app/assets/stylesheets and reset.css under vendor/stylesheets.

The extensions structure is important. The first one is mandatory and it's used to understand which asset type we are handling: .css for stylesheets. The second one is optional and it's for a preprocessor: .scss for Sass.

require 'sass'
require 'lotus/assets'

Lotus::Assets.configure do
  compile true

  sources << [
    'assets',
    'vendor/assets'
  ]
end

When from a template you do:

<%= stylesheet 'reset', 'main' %>

Your public directory will have the following structure.

% tree public
public/
└── assets
    ├── reset.css
    └── main.css

Preprocessors engines

Lotus::Assets uses Tilt to provide support for the most common preprocessors, such as Sass (including sassc-ruby), Less, ES6, JSX, CoffeScript, Opal, Handlebars, JBuilder.

In order to use one or more of them, be sure to include the corresponding gem into your Gemfile and require the library.

EcmaScript 6

We strongly suggest to use EcmaScript 6 for your next project. It isn't fully supported yet by browser vendors, but it's the future of JavaScript.

As of today, you need to transpile ES6 code into something understandable by current browsers, which is ES5. For this purpose we support Babel.

Deployment

Lotus::Assets ships with an executable (lotus-assets), which can be used to precompile assets and make them cacheable by browsers (via checksum suffix).

Let's say we have an application that has main file that requires the entire code (config/environment.rb), a gem that brings Ember.js code, and the following sources:

% tree .
├── apps
│   ├── admin
│   │   ├── assets
│   │   │   └── js
│   │   │       ├── application.js
│   │   │       └── zepto.js
# ...
│   ├── metrics
│   │   ├── assets
│   │   │   └── javascripts
│   │   │       └── dashboard.js
# ...
│   └── web
│       ├── assets
│       │   ├── images
│       │   │   └── bookshelf.jpg
│       │   └── javascripts
│       │       └── application.js
# ...
│       └── vendor
│           └── assets
│               └── javascripts
│                   └── jquery.js
└── config
    └── environment.rb

In order to deploy, we can run:

bundle exec lotus-assets --config=config/environment.rb

It will output:

tree public
public
├── assets
│   ├── admin
│   │   ├── application-28a6b886de2372ee3922fcaf3f78f2d8.js
│   │   ├── application.js
│   │   ├── ember-b2d6de1e99c79a0e52cf5c205aa2e07a.js
│   │   ├── ember-source-e74117fc6ba74418b2601ffff9eb1568.js
│   │   ├── ember-source.js
│   │   ├── ember.js
│   │   ├── zepto-ca736a378613d484138dec4e69be99b6.js
│   │   └── zepto.js
│   ├── application-d1829dc353b734e3adc24855693b70f9.js
│   ├── application.js
│   ├── bookshelf-237ecbedf745af5a477e380f0232039a.jpg
│   ├── bookshelf.jpg
│   ├── ember-b2d6de1e99c79a0e52cf5c205aa2e07a.js
│   ├── ember-source-e74117fc6ba74418b2601ffff9eb1568.js
│   ├── ember-source.js
│   ├── ember.js
│   ├── jquery-05277a4edea56b7f82a4c1442159e183.js
│   ├── jquery.js
│   └── metrics
│       ├── dashboard-7766a63ececc63a7a629bfb0666e9c62.js
│       ├── dashboard.js
│       ├── ember-b2d6de1e99c79a0e52cf5c205aa2e07a.js
│       ├── ember-source-e74117fc6ba74418b2601ffff9eb1568.js
│       ├── ember-source.js
│       └── ember.js
└── assets.json

Compressors

Minification is a process that shrink file size in production, by removing unnecessary spaces and characters. The goal of this step, is to have lighter assets to be served faster to the browsers.

Lotus supports JavaScript and stylesheets minifiers.

Because this framework relies on external gems for minification, this feature is turned off by default.

To do so we need to specify which gem we want to use and add it to our Gemfile.

JavaScript Compressors

Lotus can use the following compressors (aka minifiers) for JavaScript.

:builtin - Ruby based implementation of jsmin. It doesn't require any external gem.
:yui - YUI Compressor, it depends on yui-compressor gem and iπt requires Java 1.4+
:uglifier - UglifyJS, it depends on uglifier gem and it requires Node.js
:closure - Google Closure Compiler, it depends on closure-compiler gem and it requires Java

Lotus::Assets.configure do
  javascript_compressor :uglifier
end

Stylesheet Compressors

Lotus can use the following compressors (aka minifiers) for Stylesheet.

:builtin - Ruby based compressor. It doesn't require any external gem. It's fast, but not an efficient compressor.
:yui - YUI Compressor, it depends on yui-compressor gem and iπt requires Java 1.4+
:sass - Sass, it depends on sass gem

Lotus::Assets.configure do
  stylesheet_compressor :sass
end

Custom Compressors

We can specify our own minifiers:

Lotus::Assets.configure do
  javascript_compressor MyJavascriptCompressor.new
  stylesheet_compressor MyStylesheetCompressor.new
end

Digest Mode

This is a mode that can be activated via the configuration and it's suitable for production environments.

Lotus::Assets.configure do
  digest true
end

Once turned on, it will look at /public/assets.json, and helpers such as javascript will return a relative URL that includes the digest of the asset.

<%= javascript 'application' %>

<script src="/assets/application-d1829dc353b734e3adc24855693b70f9.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

CDN Mode

A Lotus project can serve assets via CDN.

Lotus::Assets.configure do
  scheme 'https'
  host   '123.cloudfront.net'
  port   443
  cdn    true
end

Since now on, helpers will return the CDN absolute URL for the asset.

<%= javascript 'application' %>

<script src="https://123.cloudfront.net/assets/application-d1829dc353b734e3adc24855693b70f9.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

Third party gems

Developers can maintain gems that distribute assets for Lotus. For instance lotus-ember or lotus-jquery.

As a gem developer, you must add one or more paths, where the assets are stored inside the gem.

# lib/lotus/jquery.rb
Lotus::Assets.sources << '/path/to/jquery'

Running tests

Make sure you have one of ExecJS supported runtime on your machine.
Java 1.4+

bundle exec rake test

Versioning

Lotus::Assets uses Semantic Versioning 2.0.0

Contributing

Fork it ( https://github.com/lotus/assets/fork )
Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
Create new Pull Request