Working With Rails

Bundled Assets

= ASSETS_BUNDLE

This plugin bundles up your CSS and Javascript files on the fly and caches them using the regular Rails page caching mechanism.

You can find more detailled information on this plugin in this article: http://www.artweb-design.de/2007/4/13/rails-plugin-blazing-fast-page-loads-through-bundled-css-and-javascript

For benchmarks and detailled explanations of this concept see:

http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2007/04/10/faster-page-loads-bundle-your-css-and-javascript/ http://rakaz.nl/item/make_your_pages_load_faster_by_combining_and_compressing_javascript_and_css_files

The plugin uses

• Ruby Javascript Minifier created by Douglas Crockford (http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html)
• Code from Asset_Packager created by Scott Becker (http://sbecker.net/shared/plugins/asset_packager)

  Installation

Drop the plugin in your vendor/plugin directory (e.g. using script/plugin install [...])

Add the following route to your routes setup:

map.connect 'bundles/:names.:ext', :controller => 'assets_bundle', :action => 'fetch', :ext => /css|js/, :names => /[^.]*/

That’s it. Don’t forget to restart your server.

Usage

After installing the plugin you can use it by accessing URLs like:

http://example.com/bundles/one,two,three.css http://example.com/bundles/one,two,three.js

one, two, three should (if they don’t, they are ignored) correspond to either a file or subdirectory under public/stylesheets or public/javascripts respectively. If they correspond to a subdirectory, all CSS or Javascript files in this directory and recursively all of its subdirectories will be merged into the bundle.

E.g. there are the following tags on my blog (http://www.artweb-design.de)

<link href=”/bundles/layout,styles,search-tag.css” rel=”stylesheet” type=”d”text” />

NOTE: This description has been extracted from the Plugin README and so the formatting may need updating to make browser friendly