Note: this project has been discontinued in favor of Elixir

Asset Manager

This is a little helper package for Laravel to use in combination with e.g. Gulp.

The advantage of this package is that it automatically handles versioned assets. With versioned assets, you can benefit from cache busting when an asset changes. This way your clients will always use the correct assets and not an old cached version.

For example the gulpfile.js below will produce a public/css/styles-{hash}.css and public/js/scripts-{hash}.js file where {hash} is the MD5 hash of the built file.

By using the Asset facade, you'll be able to include these assets without having to take care of those hashes.

For example Asset::scripts('frontend') would result in <script scr="public/js/scripts-627d37eb.js"></script>.

Installation

1. Add "modbase/asset-manager": "0.1.*" to your composer.json file.
2. Run composer update
3. Add 'Modbase\AssetManager\AssetManagerServiceProvider' to your service providers in app/config/app.php.

Example gulpfile.js

var gulp = require('gulp');
var styl = require('gulp-styl');
var uglify = require('gulp-uglify');
var concat = require('gulp-concat');
var rev = require('gulp-rev');
var clean = require('gulp-clean');
var filename = require('gulp-asset-manifest');

// Paths to your asset files
var paths = {
    frontend: {
        scripts: [
            'app/assets/javascript/vendor/**/*.js',
            'app/assets/javascript/*.js'
        ],
        styles: [
            'app/assets/css/vendor/**/*.css',
            'app/assets/css/*.css'
        ]
    }
}

// CSS task
gulp.task('css', function() {
    // Cleanup old assets
    gulp.src('public/css/styles-*.css', { read: false }).pipe(clean());

    // Prefix, compress and concat the CSS assets
    // Afterwards add the MD5 hash to the filename
    gulp.src(paths.frontend.styles)
        .pipe(styl({ compress: true }))
        .pipe(concat('styles.css'))
        .pipe(rev())
        .pipe(filename({ bundleName: 'frontend.styles' })) // This will create/update the assets.json file
        .pipe(gulp.dest('public/css'));
});

// JavaScript task
gulp.task('js', function() {
    // Cleanup old assets
    gulp.src('public/js/scripts-*.js', { read: false }).pipe(clean());

    // Concat and uglify the JavaScript assets
    // Afterwards add the MD5 hash to the filename
    gulp.src(paths.frontend.scripts)
        .pipe(concat('scripts.js'))
        .pipe(uglify())
        .pipe(rev())
        .pipe(filename({ bundleName: 'frontend.scripts' })) // This will create/update the assets.json file
        .pipe(gulp.dest('public/js'));
});

// The default task (called when you run `gulp` from cli)
gulp.task('default', ['css', 'js']);

Laravel Facade

Use this in your views: Asset::styles('frontend') and Asset::scripts('frontend').

The arguments of the styles() and scripts() methods correspond to the bundleName prefix you've given in the gulpfile.js. In the example above, it was frontend. Always end the bundleName with .scripts or .styles so that the AssetManager knows what to fetch.

Example workflow

1. Use the above example gulpfile.js and update whatever you want, but be careful with the bundleName option!
2. In your master.blade.php (assuming you're using the awesome Blade template engine and have a master layout) add {{ Asset::styles('frontend') }} to your head section. Add {{ Asset::scripts('frontend') }} at the bottom of your HTML (you should put your JavaScript at the bottom, just before the closing body tag to speed up loading).
3. Add your assets to app/assets/css and app/assets/js (according to the gulpfile.js paths).
4. Run gulp or gulp css or gulp js everytime you update your assets (or simply use a gulp watch).
5. Enjoy!