ass.ets 0.0.2

Asset management for webapps.

The main purpose of an assets management application is to map local paths to urls on the server. Secondly you want to apply filters to sets of files, e.g. you want to merge and minify them. You often want this build-process to be automatic, on-the-fly, just by pressing refresh in your webbrowser. Later, in a production mode of your web application you just want to serve different, specific versions of your files.

Since I was just too dumb to use miracle2k’s webassets - did three days to write a new filter, new manifest implementation, then the ASSETS tag for jinja didn’t liked my multiple environments - I put together this simple stuff.

from ass.ets import *
from ass.ets.filters import *

import os
here = os.path.dirname( os.path.realpath(__file__) )

env = Environment(
        map_from=os.path.join(here, 'static'),
        map_to='/static',
        # t.i. a local file ./static/lib.js will later be served as /static/lib.js

        manifest=os.path.join(here, 'assets-manifest'),   # we don't want the manifest in the static dir

        #some defaults
        production=use_manifest #in production mode we ask the manifest which file to serve, in this case we need to build before we deploy
        #note: use_manifest is just a filter
)

jslib = bundle(
        "jquery.1.7.1.js", #...
        name='jslib',   # the naive manifest implementation uses this name
        env=env,        # the bundle inherits all the settings from env
        #very explicit pipe of filters
        development=[read, merge, store_as('jslib.js')],
        build_=[read, merge, uglifyjs, store_as('jslib-%(version)s.js'), store_manifest],
        #yes ^ thats an underscore, because bundles have a build() method
)

# now we could do
# env.mode = 'development'
# print [url for url in jslib.urls()]

# in our build script we do
# env.mode = 'build_'
# print [url for url in jslib.build()]

There’s is no much difference between urls() and build(). In the above example both pipes - ‘development’ and ‘built_’ - yield relative paths at the end, urls() just uses env.map_to to construct a url, where build() maps to the local path using map_from. Internally build() appends the following filter to the chain:

@worker
def local_path(files, bundle):
        for file in files:
                yield os.path.join(bundle.map_from, file)

The @worker annotation comes from the useless.pipes package.

Ok, add another bundle:

less_styles = Bundle(
        'styles.less',
        name='less_style',
        env=env,
        development=as_is,
        build_=[read, merge, lessify]
)
all_styles = Bundle(
        less_styles, 'main.css',
        name='all_styles',
        env=env,
        development=as_is,
        build_=[read, merge, minify, store_as('styles-%(version)s.css'), store_manifest]
)

T.i. in development mode we just spit the files as they are, when we build the less-file gets ‘delessed’, after that all css-files are merged and stored. Note that the less_styles.build_ chain yields the css-content. We don’t store a temporary file. The current implementation of read actually expects nested bundles to yield contents not filenames.

Ok, now we need the less-js file in the development version of our app. We write a simple filter:

def add(*filenames):
        @worker
        def add_(items, bundle):
                for item in items:
                        yield item

                for filename in filenames:
                        yield filename

        return add_

# and then
less_styles = Bundle(
        'styles.less',
        name='less_style',
        development=[as_is, add('less-1.2.1.min.js')],
        build_=[read, merge, lessify]
)


# all_styles.urls() now yields .css, .less and .js files in development mode and one .css file in built_ or production mode.

In jinja we could define two macros:

    {%- macro asset(url) %}
    {%- if url.endswith('.js') %}<script type="text/javascript" src="{{ url }}"></script>{%- endif %}
    {%- if url.endswith('.css') %}<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{ url }}" />{%- endif %}
    {%- if url.endswith('.less') %}<link rel="stylesheet/less" type="text/css" href="{{ url }}" />{%- endif %}
{%- endmacro %}
{%- macro assets_for(bundle) %}
    {%- for url in bundle.urls() %}
        {{ asset(url) }}
    {%- endfor %}
{%- endmacro %}

Assume Flask and g.all_styles = all_styles:

{{ assets_for(g.all_styles) }}

and we’re done.

Some last things; if you often write:

[read, merge, uglifyjs, store_as('...'), store_manifest]

You could instead write something like this:

process_js = (read, merge, uglifyjs)
jslib.build_ = process_js + (store_as('...'), store_manifest)

OR

def process_js_and_store(fn):
        return [read, merge, uglifyjs, store_as(fn), store_manifest]
jslib.build_ = process_js_and_store('...')

A worker that combines other filters by the way looks rather awkward:

@worker
def read_and_merge(items, bundle):
        return items | read(bundle) | merge(bundle)