Asset management
This plugin allows you to use the Webassets module to manage assets such as CSS and JS files. The module must first be installed:
pip install webassets
The Webassets module allows you to perform a number of useful asset management functions, including:
- CSS minifier (cssmin, yui_css, ...)
- CSS compiler (less, sass, ...)
- JS minifier (uglifyjs, yui_js, closure, ...)
Others filters include CSS URL rewriting, integration of images in CSS via data URIs, and more. Webassets can also append a version identifier to your asset URL to convince browsers to download new versions of your assets when you use far-future expires headers. Please refer to the Webassets documentation for more information.
When used with Pelican, Webassets is configured to process assets in the OUTPUT_PATH/theme directory. You can use Webassets in your templates by including one or more template tags. The Jinja variable {{ ASSET_URL }} can be used in templates and is relative to the theme/ url. The {{ ASSET_URL }} variable should be used in conjunction with the {{ SITEURL }} variable in order to generate URLs properly. For example:
{% assets filters="cssmin", output="css/style.min.css", "css/inuit.css", "css/pygment-monokai.css", "css/main.css" %}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ ASSET_URL }}">
{% endassets %}
... will produce a minified css file with a version identifier that looks like:
<link href="http://{SITEURL}/theme/css/style.min.css?b3a7c807" rel="stylesheet">
These filters can be combined. Here is an example that uses the SASS compiler and minifies the output:
{% assets filters="sass,cssmin", output="css/style.min.css", "css/style.scss" %}
<link rel="stylesheet" href="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ ASSET_URL }}">
{% endassets %}
Another example for Javascript:
{% assets filters="uglifyjs", output="js/packed.js", "js/jquery.js", "js/base.js", "js/widgets.js" %}
<script src="{{ SITEURL }}/{{ ASSET_URL }}"></script>
{% endassets %}
The above will produce a minified JS file:
<script src="http://{SITEURL}/theme/js/packed.js?00703b9d"></script>
Pelican's debug mode is propagated to Webassets to disable asset packaging and instead work with the uncompressed assets.
If you need to create named bundles (for example, if you need to compile SASS files before minifying with other CSS files), you can use the ASSET_BUNDLES variable in your settings file. This is an ordered sequence of 3-tuples, where the 3-tuple is defined as (name, args, kwargs). This tuple is passed to the environment's register() method. The following will compile two SCSS files into a named bundle, using the pyscss filter:
ASSET_BUNDLES = (
('scss', ['colors.scss', 'main.scss'], {'filters': 'pyscss'}),
)
Many of Webasset's available compilers have additional configuration options (i.e. 'Less', 'Sass', 'Stylus', 'Closure_js'). You can pass these options to Webassets using the ASSET_CONFIG in your settings file.
The following will handle Google Closure's compilation level and locate LessCSS's binary:
ASSET_CONFIG = (('closure_compressor_optimization', 'WHITESPACE_ONLY'),
('less_bin', 'lessc.cmd'), )
If you wish to place your assets in locations other than the theme output directory, you can use ASSET_SOURCE_PATHS in your settings file to provide webassets with a list of additional directories to search, relative to the theme's top-level directory. For example:
ASSET_SOURCE_PATHS = (
'vendor/css',
'scss',
)
