Minimatic 1.0

CSS and Javascript Minification/Combination Upgrade to WebHelpers

An extension to WebHelpers that enables a real time JS/CSS combination and minification in production mode.

Installation

Using easy_install:

$ easy_install minimatic

Using pip:

$ pip install minimatic

Source code

Git repository is located at GitHub.com.

Usage

It extends the WebHelpers functions javascript_link and stylesheet_link to take a modified set of parameters:

• sources (list): JS/CSS items to process. Each item is one of the following:

  • (dict) with keys:

    • file: a path to the source file relative to the static file root

    • minify: minification method. Possible values (default False):

      • False (bool): use the source unmodified

      • strip (str): only strip extra whitespace and comments (applicable to CSS only)

      • minify (str): strip whitespace and apply other possible JS/CSS minifications. Note that this involves source parsing and will err on syntax errors (CSS hacks will be removed!). In effect the resulting file may be logically different

    • dest: if the source list is not combined then each item must provide a destination filename relative to the static file root

  • (str): it will be treated as (see above):

    {'file': (str), 'minify': False}

• combined (str): the combined filename relative to the static file root. Implies that the files need to be combined. If combined is None then every Item must have a dest key provided.

• beaker_kwargs (dict): override default arguments that will be passed to beaker_cache. beaker_kwargs.update() is issued on default arguments.

• timestamp append time.time timestamp to links to force browsers reload the JS/CSS assets, eg. test.js?t=123012343

The files will be combined in production mode; in development mode (debug=True) they will be served unmodified separately.

Example

Mix and match the sources into one big JS file:

>>> javascript_link(
...     # These files are already minified; combine them only
...     '/js/jquery.js',
...     '/js/jquery-ui-custom.js',
...     # These are custom files which need to be minified first
...     dict(file='/js/base.js', minify='minify'),
...     dict(file='/js/page-script.js', minify='minify'),
...     combined='/combined/js/scripts.js',
...     timestamp=True)

Serve CSS files separately (uncombined):

>>> stylesheet_link(
...     # This stylesheet is valid CSS and safe to parse and minify
...     dict(file='/css/base.css', minify='minify',
...         dest='/combined/css/base.css'),
...     # This stylesheet is full of CSS hacks and only the extra whitespace
...     # and comments should be stripped
...     dict(file='/css/styles.ie6.css', minify='strip',
...         dest='/combined/css/styles.ie6.css'),
...     timestamp=True)