enhance-css

What is enhance-css?

Enhance-css is a node.js tool which can tweak your CSS files to:

• improve caching - by rewriting URLs and renaming files to include either timestamps or MD5 hashes;
• parellelize requests - by rewriting URLs with one or more asset hosts;
• reduce number of requests - by embedding images as Base64 data.

There is also an option to create non-embedded version suited well for older browsers (IE 7 and below).

Usage

What are the requirements?

node.js 0.8.0+ (fully tested on OS X 10.6+, CentOS, and Windows 7)

How to install enhance-css?

npm install enhance-css

How to use enhance-css CLI?

enhancecss [options] [source-file]

-h, --help                    output usage information
-v, --version                 output the version number
-r, --root [root-path]        Set a root path to which resolve absolute @import rules
-o, --output [output-file]    Use [output-file] as output instead of STDOUT
--crypted-stamp               Rename image files with MD5 hash attached (hard cache boosters)
--no-stamp                    Disable adding stamp to URLs
--no-embed-version            Output both embedded and non embedded version
--force-embed                 Forces embed on all supported assets
--asset-hosts [host-pattern]  Use one or more asset hosts, e.g assets[0,1,2].example.com
--pregzip                     Automatically gzip the enhanced files (not available when no output file given)

Examples:

Most likely you are going to pass multiple CSS files into it and specify root directory and output file, e.g.

cat path/to/first.css path/to/second.css path/to/third.css | enhancecss -o bundled.css --root ./public/

The --root parameter is required to properly locate images referenced in the css files.

To embed images in Base64 just add the embed argument to the image url, e.g.

a { background: url(/images/arrow.png?embed) 0 0 no-repeat; }

Non-embedded version

In case you also need to support older browser, just add --noembedversion parameter, e.g.

cat path/to/first.css path/to/second.css path/to/third.css | enhancecss -o bundled.css --root ./public/ --noembedversion

which will result in two output files: bundled.css and bundled-noembed.css.

Asset hosts

To use one or more asset hosts, just specify --assetshosts parameter, e.g.

cat path/to/first.css path/to/second.css path/to/third.css | enhancecss -o bundled.css --root ./public/ --assethosts assets[0,1].example.com

which will result in all non-embedded image URLs bound to either assets0.example.com or assets1.example.com.

What are the enhance-css' dev commands?

First clone the source, then run:

• npm run check to check JS sources with JSHint
• npm test for the test suite

License

Enhance-css is released under the MIT License.