Solder

Solder combines and minifies groups of CSS and/or JavaScript files in real-time for easy development and debugging.

When you're ready to build a release, Solder creates combined and minified files for production.

Solder is a port of Weld to work with Node.

Installation

$ npm install solder

Usage

$ solder --help

Components

Components are groups of CSS and/or JS files. Individual files can be on the local file system or at remote URLs. Components can require other components to create modular dependencies.

CSS & JS Compressors

Solder has built in support for YUI Compressor for CSS and JS, and Google Closure Compiler for JS only. However, you must provide your own jars.

Configuration

Solder looks in the current directory for a configuration file named solder-config.js unless an alternate configuration file is specified.

See examples/solder-config.js for a simple complete Solder configuration.

App Integration

Solder can be used directly from your app to serve components during development.

Express

Most Express applications can benefit from Solder's Express Route one-liner. In fact, the following example is a complete Solder server.

var server = require('express').createServer(),
    solder = require('solder');

solder.expressRoute(server);

server.listen(3000);

Other

If you're not using Express, Solder can be used directly from within any application. Just match request URLs against Solder's urlPattern regular expression -- or your own regex -- and then process the matches.

See examples/http.js directory for an example of a custom setup.

Stand-alone Server

The solder command-line tool includes a stand-alone Solder server. Just run solder with no arguments. The Solder server will listen on port 8675 unless a port is specified.

$ solder
Solder server started at http://localhost:8675/

Solder URLs

At runtime, Solder acts on URLs beginning with /solder.

http://example.com/solder/foo.css

The filename foo.css tells Solder to serve the css portion of the component named foo.

If you don't want Solder to minify your components, add the no-minify query parameter.

http://example.com/solder/foo.css?no-minify

Build Time

Use the solder command-line tool to concatenate and compress one or more components in a single step.

$ solder foo
--> foo-201009042022.css
--> foo-201009042022.js

Use the -o (--output-dir) option to save soldered files to a specific directory.

CDN

Use the -p (--push) option to push soldered files to the configured CDN instead of saving them locally. Basic Amazon S3 support is built in.

Contributors

• Brett Stimmerman <brettstimmerman@gmail.com>
• Ryan Grove <ryan@wonko.com> (Original author of Weld)

License

Solder is licensed under the same terms as Weld, the MIT License.