assetgraph

AssetGraph

AssetGraph is an extensible, node.js <http://nodejs.org/>_-based framework for manipulating and optimizing web pages and web applications. It's the core of the third generation of the production builder tool we are using at One.com for some of our web apps. It's in a somewhat usable early alpha state, but still likely to undergo massive changes.

Check out the slides from a presentation of AssetGraph <http://gofish.dk/assetgraph.pdf>_ held at the Öresund JavaScript Meetup <http://www.meetup.com/The-Oresund-JavaScript-Meetup/>_ on June 16th, 2011.

The complete AssetGraph-based build system mentioned in the slides can be found here <https://github.com/One-com/assetgraph-builder>_.

Currently AssetGraph does the following:

• Build an asset graph programmatically or load it from disk or a remote server via http.
• Find explicit dependencies between JavaScript and CSS roll them out as <script> and <link rel='stylesheet'> tags in your HTML. For now only a homegrown one.include syntax is supported, but the parsing phase can be adapted to almost any syntax.
• Bundle and inline CSS and JavaScript.
• Create a cache manifest with references to all the assets your web app needs to be usable offline.
• Move all CSS, JavaScript, image assets etc. to a static dir and rename them to md5.extension so the web server can be configured to set a far-future Cache-Control.
• Help getting your static assets on a CDN by allowing you to easily rewrite all references to them.
• Use Graphviz to visualize your dependencies at any step.
• Using the separate assetgraph-sprite transform <https://github.com/One-com/assetgraph-sprite>_: Optimize CSS background images by creating sprite images. The spriting is guided by a set of custom CSS properties with a -one-sprite prefix.

The observation that inspired the project is that most of the above optimizations are easily expressed in terms of graph manipulations, where the nodes are the assets (HTML, CSS, images, JavaScript...) and the edges are the relations between them, e.g. anchor tags, image tags, favorite icons, css background-image properties and so on.

AssetGraph provides a basic data model that allows you to populate, query, and manipulate the graph at a high level of abstraction. Additionally, each individual asset can be inspected and massaged using a relevant API: DOM for HTML (using jsdom <https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom>), CSSOM for CSS (using NV's CSSOM module <https://github.com/NV/CSSOM>), and an abstract syntax tree for JavaScript (powered by UglifyJS <https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS/>_' parser).

Installation

Make sure you have node.js and npm <http://npmjs.org/>_ installed, then run::

$ npm install assetgraph

Basic usage

Creating an AssetGraph object::

var AssetGraph = require('assetgraph'),
    ag = new AssetGraph(options);

Currently the only supported option is root, which specifies the root url of the graph. It is required for AssetGraph to be able to resolve root-relative urls in assets loaded from disc. It can be specified either as a fully qualified url or a (optionally relative) file system path, and it defaults to the current directory. The AssetGraph constructor normalizes the root to an absolute url ending in a slash and makes it available as the root property of the AssetGraph instance.

Example usage::

console.log(new AssetGraph().root); // 'file:///current/working/dir/'

var ag = new AssetGraph({root: '/home/thatguy/my/project'});
console.log(ag.root); // 'file:///home/thatguy/my/project/'

// When the graph is populated, root-relative urls in relations will be resolved relative to this url,
// e.g. /foo/bar.png => file:///home/thatguy/my/project/foo/bar.png

Assets

An asset object represents a single node in an AssetGraph, but can be used and manipulated on its own outside the graph context. It can even be present in multiple AssetGraphs at once.

Most of the time it's unnecessary to create asset objects directly. When you need to manipulate assets that already exist on disc or on a web server, the loadAssets and populate transforms are the easiest way to get the objects created. See the section about transforms below.

asset.url (string)

The absolute url of the asset (uses the file: schema if loaded from disc). Will be undefined for inline assets.

asset.rawSrc (getter)

Buffer object representing the undecoded source of the asset.

asset.text (getter)

Only supported for text-based assets (subclasses of assets.Text) such as assets.Html, assets.JavaScript, and assets.Css.

Get a JavaScript string with the decoded text contents of the asset. Unlike browsers AssetGraph doesn't try to sniff the charset of your text-based assets. It will fall back to assuming utf-8 if it's unable to determine the encoding/charset from HTTP headers, <meta http-equiv='Content-Type'> tags (Html), @charset (Css), so if for some reason you're not using utf-8 for all your text-based assets, make sure to provide those hints. Other asset types provide no standard way to specify the charset within the file itself, so presently there's no way to load JavaScript from disc if it's not utf-8 or ASCII.

asset.parseTree (getter)

Some asset classes support inspection and manipulation using a high level interface. When you're done modifying the parse tree, remember to tell the AssetGraph instance that the asset is now dirty by calling asset.markDirty().

These are the formats you'll get:

assets.Html and assets.Xml jsdom <https://github.com/tmpvar/jsdom>_ document object.

assets.Css CSSOM <https://github.com/NV/CSSOM>_ CSSStyleSheet object.

assets.JavaScript UglifyJS <https://github.com/mishoo/UglifyJS>_ AST object.

assets.Json Regular JavaScript object (the result of JSON.parse on the decoded source).

assets.CacheManifest A JavaScript object with a key for each section present in the manifest (CACHE, NETWORK, REMOTE). The value is an array with an item for each entry in the section. Refer to the source for details.

asset.markDirty()

Sets the dirty flag of the asset, which is the way to say that the asset has been manipulated since it was first loaded (read from disc or loaded via http). For inline assets the flag is set if the asset has been manipulated since it was last synchronized with (copied into) its containing asset.

Querying the graph

AssetGraph supports a flexible syntax for finding assets and relations in a populated graph using the findAssets and findRelations methods. Both methods take a query object as the first argument. Some basic examples::

// Get an array containing all assets in the graph:
var allAssets = assetGraph.findAssets();

// Find assets by type:
var htmlAssets = assetGraph.findAssets({type: 'Html'});

// Find assets by matching a regular expression against the url:
var localImageAssets = assetGraph.findAssets({url: /^file:.*\.(?:png|gif|jpg)$/});

// Find assets by predicate function:
var orphanedJavaScriptAssets = assetGraph.findAssets(function (asset) {
    return asset.type === 'JavaScript' && assetGraph.findRelations({to: asset}).length === 0;
});

// Find all HtmlScript (<script src=...> and inline <script>) relations:
var allHtmlScriptRelations = assetGraph.findRelations({type: 'HtmlScript'});

Query objects have "and" semantics, so all conditions must be met for a multi-criteria query to match::

var textBasedAssetsOnGoogleCom = assetGraph.findAssets({
    isText: true,
    url: /^https?:\/\/(?:www\.)google\.com\//
});

// Find assets by existence of incoming relations (experimental feature):
var importedCssAssets = assetGraph.findAssets({type: 'Css', incoming: {type: 'CssImport'}})

Relation queries can contain nested asset queries when querying the to and from properties::

// Find all HtmlAnchor (<a href=...>) relations pointing at local images:
assetGraph.findRelations({
    type: 'HtmlAnchor',
    to: {isImage: true, url: /^file:/}
});

Transforms and workflows

TODO. Look in the examples folder for now.

License

AssetGraph is licensed under a standard 3-clause BSD license -- see the LICENSE-file for details.

Changelog

v0.2.3

• Release 0.2.3. (Andreas Lind Petersen)
• Simplified and fixed relations.JavaScriptOneInclude. Added test. (Andreas Lind Petersen)
• Now working on 0.2.3. (Andreas Lind Petersen)