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NAME

Mojolicious::Plugin::AssetPack::Manual::Assets - How to define assets

DESCRIPTION

This manual will show you various ways to define assets with Mojolicious::Plugin::AssetPack.

DEFINING ASSETS

First you need to load the plugin. Here is an example lite app, which does that:

  plugin "AssetPack";

Local assets

Here is the basic way of defining an asset:

  app->asset(
    "some-asset.js" => (
      "/js/foo.js",
      "/js/bar.js",
    )
  );

The "some-asset.js" string is just so you can refer to the generated bundle in your templates later, while the list of files after (foo.js and bar.js) are files that exist in one of the public static directories defined in your application.

Online assets

The assets do not need to be on the same machine. They can also be fetched from the world wide web:

  app->asset(
    "bundle.js" => (
      "http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/es5-shim/2.3.0/es5-shim.js",
      "http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/es5-shim/2.3.0/es5-sham.js",
      "http://code.jquery.com/jquery-1.11.0.js",
      "/js/myapp.js",
    )
  );

The code above will download three assets from web and combine them with one asset defined locally.

NOTE! The online assets are cached locally, which means that they will not be refreshed, unless you manually delete them.

Dynamic assets

This is very similar to "Online assets", except that they are generated by the current Mojolicious application.

  app->asset("some-asset.css" => "/dynamic-path/foo.css")

The above "/dynamic-path/foo.css" will be fetched from the current app unless a static file has the same name.

Wildcards

Assests can be brought in via wildcards:

  app->asset(
    "bundle.js" => ("/js/myapp.js", "/js/*.js")
  );

The /js/*.js will tell AssetPack to look in all public directories for any files mathing the wildcard expression. Note that since "myapp.js" is already defined, it will not be added again even if the wildcard expression match that file.

If there is a need to set a load precedence, simply add the files that need to be loaded first into the array before the wildcard or prefix the filenames with a number: 01-polyfill.js, 02-main.js, ...

Custom source directories

It's possible to make AssetPack look for source files in a different directory than in the public directories. This is useful if you want to keep your source files outside of the web root.

  plugin AssetPack => {
    source_paths => [
      "assets",
      "/usr/share/assets",
      @{$app->static->paths},
    ]
  };

The code above tells AssetPack to look for assets in the "assets" directory, relative to the app home dir, then in the absolute path "/usr/share/assets" and fallback to the static directories (web root).

This is also very neat when using morbo to watch your files:

  # Before and after specifying "source_paths"
  $ moboo -w public/css -w public/js -w public/tags -w public/sass -w lib
  $ morbo -w assets -w lib

  # This will cause an infinite loop, since public/packed change on
  # application reload:
  $ morbo -w public -w lib

NEXT

Now that you know how to define your assets, you can start using them in your templates.

AUTHOR

Jan Henning Thorsen - jhthorsen@cpan.org