enhance-css

What is enhance-css?

Enhance-css is a node.js library for enhancing CSS with:

• external files stamps to boost chaching (either timestamps or MD5 hashes);
• image embedding to Base64 (to reduce number of requests);
• spawning assets into multiple asset hosts (to paralelize requests);

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 0.6.0+ on *nix (fully tested on OS X 10.6+ and CentOS 5.x)
node 0.8.0+ on Windows

How to install enhance-css?

npm install enhance-css

How to use enhance-css?

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/

Root ('--root') parameter is required to properly locate images referenced in css files.

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

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

No embed 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 not-embedded image urls bound to either assets0.example.com or assets1.example.com.

License

Enhance-css is released under the MIT license.