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Building an Asset Processing Framework

This guide is for using a Sprockets::Environment to process assets. You would use this class directly if you were building a feature similar to Rail's asset pipeline. If you aren't building an asset processing frameworks, you will want to refer to the End User Asset Generation guide instead. For a reference use of Sprockets::Environment see sprockets-rails.

Understanding the Sprockets Environment

You'll need an instance of the Sprockets::Environment class to access and serve assets from your application. Under Rails 4.0 and later, Rails.application.assets is a preconfigured Sprockets::Environment instance. For Rack-based applications, create an instance in config.ru.

The Sprockets Environment has methods for retrieving and serving assets, manipulating the load path, and registering processors. It is also a Rack application that can be mounted at a URL to serve assets over HTTP.

The Load Path

The load path is an ordered list of directories that Sprockets uses to search for assets.

In the simplest case, a Sprockets environment's load path will consist of a single directory containing your application's asset source files. When mounted, the environment will serve assets from this directory as if they were static files in your public root.

The power of the load path is that it lets you organize your source files into multiple directories -- even directories that live outside your application -- and combine those directories into a single virtual filesystem. That means you can easily bundle JavaScript, CSS and images into a Ruby library or Bower package and import them into your application.

Manipulating the Load Path

To add a directory to your environment's load path, use the append_path and prepend_path methods. Directories at the beginning of the load path have precedence over subsequent directories.

environment = Sprockets::Environment.new
environment.append_path 'app/assets/javascripts'
environment.append_path 'lib/assets/javascripts'
environment.append_path 'vendor/assets/bower_components'

In general, you should append to the path by default and reserve prepending for cases where you need to override existing assets.

Precompile Files

In addition to providing a path, you'll need to give sprockets an entry point to start precompiling files for production deployment. This is usually done via the Sprockets::Manifest class like:

SprocketsManifest#find(config.assets.precompile).map(&:logical_path).to_set

You can see an example in sprockets-rails.

Accessing Assets

Once you've set up your environment's load path, you can mount the environment as a Rack server and request assets via HTTP. You can also access assets programmatically from within your application.

Logical Paths

Assets in Sprockets are always referenced by their logical path.

The logical path is the path of the asset source file relative to its containing directory in the load path. For example, if your load path contains the directory app/assets/javascripts:

Logical path Source file on disk
application.js app/assets/javascripts/application.js
models/project.js app/assets/javascripts/models/project.js
hello.js app/assets/javascripts/hello.coffee

Note: For assets that are compiled or transpiled, you want to specify the extension that you want, not the extension on disk. For example we specified hello.js even if the file on disk is a coffeescript file, since the asset it will generate is javascript.

In this way, all directories in the load path are merged to create a virtual filesystem whose entries are logical paths.

Serving Assets Over HTTP

When you mount an environment, all of its assets are accessible as logical paths underneath the mount point. For example, if you mount your environment at /assets and request the URL /assets/application.js, Sprockets will search your load path for the file named application.js and serve it.

Under Rails 4.0 and later, your Sprockets environment is automatically mounted at /assets. If you are using Sprockets with a Rack application, you will need to mount the environment yourself. A good way to do this is with the map method in config.ru:

require 'sprockets'
map '/assets' do
  environment = Sprockets::Environment.new
  environment.append_path 'app/assets/javascripts'
  environment.append_path 'app/assets/stylesheets'
  run environment
end

map '/' do
  run YourRackApp
end

Accessing Assets Programmatically

You can use the find_asset method (aliased as []) to retrieve an asset from a Sprockets environment. Pass it a logical path and you'll get a Sprockets::Asset instance back:

environment['application.js']
# => #<Sprockets::Asset ...>

Call to_s on the resulting asset to access its contents, length to get its length in bytes, mtime to query its last-modified time, and filename to get its full path on the filesystem.

Using Processors

Asset source files can be written in another format, like SCSS or CoffeeScript, and automatically compiled to CSS or JavaScript by Sprockets. Processors that convert a file from one format to another are called transformers.

Invoking Ruby with ERB

Sprockets provides an ERB engine for preprocessing assets using embedded Ruby code. Append .erb to a CSS or JavaScript asset's filename to enable the ERB engine.

Ruby code embedded in an asset is evaluated in the context of a Sprockets::Context instance for the given asset. Common uses for ERB include:

  • embedding another asset as a Base64-encoded data: URI with the asset_data_uri helper
  • inserting the URL to another asset, such as with the asset_path helper provided by the Sprockets Rails plugin
  • embedding other application resources, such as a localized string database, in a JavaScript asset via JSON
  • embedding version constants loaded from another file

See the Helper Methods section for more information about interacting with Sprockets::Context instances via ERB.

Managing and Bundling Dependencies

You can create asset bundles -- ordered concatenations of asset source files -- by specifying dependencies in a special comment syntax at the top of each source file.

Sprockets reads these comments, called directives, and processes them to recursively build a dependency graph. When you request an asset with dependencies, the dependencies will be included in order at the top of the file.

The Directive Processor

Sprockets runs the directive processor on each CSS and JavaScript source file. The directive processor scans for comment lines beginning with = in comment blocks at the top of the file.

//= require jquery
//= require jquery-ui
//= require backbone
//= require_tree .

The first word immediately following = specifies the directive name. Any words following the directive name are treated as arguments. Arguments may be placed in single or double quotes if they contain spaces, similar to commands in the Unix shell.

Note: Non-directive comment lines will be preserved in the final asset, but directive comments are stripped after processing. Sprockets will not look for directives in comment blocks that occur after the first line of code.

Supported Comment Types

The directive processor understands comment blocks in three formats:

/* Multi-line comment blocks (CSS, SCSS, JavaScript)
 *= require foo
 */
// Single-line comment blocks (SCSS, JavaScript)
//= require foo
# Single-line comment blocks (CoffeeScript)
#= require foo

Processor Interface

Sprockets 2.x was originally designed around Tilt's engine interface. However, starting with 3.x, a new interface has been introduced deprecating Tilt.

Similar to Rack, a processor is any "callable" (an object that responds to call). This may be a simple Proc or a full class that defines a def self.call(input) method. The call method accepts an input Hash and returns a Hash of metadata.

Also see Sprockets::ProcessorUtils for public helper methods.

Gzip

By default when Sprockets generates a compiled asset file it will also produce a gzipped copy of that file. Sprockets only gzips non-binary files such as CSS, JavaScript, and SVG files.

For example if Sprockets is generating

application-12345.css

Then it will also generate a compressed copy in

application-12345.css.gz

You can disable this behavior Sprockets::Environment#gzip= to something falsey for example:

env = Sprockets::Environment.new(".")
env.gzip = false

By default Sprockets uses zlib to generate the compiled asset, you can use zopfli by installing the zopfli gem and then telling Sprockets to compile assets with it:

env = Sprockets::Environment.new(".")
env.gzip = :zopfli

Setting to any other truthy value will enable zlib compression.

WIP

This guide is a work in progress. There are many different groups of people who interact with Sprockets. Some only need to know directive syntax to put in their asset files, some are building features like the Rails asset pipeline, and some are plugging into Sprockets and writing things like preprocessors. The goal of these guides are to provide task specific guidance to make the expected behavior explicit. If you are using Sprockets and you find missing information in these guides, please consider submitting a pull request with updated information.

These guides live in guides.