Laravel Assets

This package provides a simpler alternative to using gulp/elixir in L5. It's designed to get out of your way and allow you to work without worrying about running a watch command and waiting for files to compile. All you'll need to do is store your assets in /resources/assets, and the package will automatically detect changes and compile (and cache) on page load.

In production environments, you should run the assets:publish command to precompile all assets and move them into the public directory where your web server can more effeciently serve them.

Installation

Add the package to composer

composer require "shnhrrsn/laravel-assets" "dev-master"

Add the following line to your service providers in config/app.php

		'Assets\ServiceProvider',

(Optional) Update your .gitignore files to ignore published assets

All of your assets should live in /resources/assets, so it's a good idea to update your .gitignore to make sure published assets don't accidentally make their way into git.

echo "published_assets.php" >> config/.gitignore
echo "css/" >> public/.gitignore
echo "img/" >> public/.gitignore
echo "js/" >> public/.gitignore
echo "font/" >> public/.gitignore

Install required binaries/packages

As noted below in TODO, there's no way to auto-install the binaries/packages needed to compile the assets, so you'll need to do that by hand for now:

sudo gem install compass sass
sudo npm install -g coffee-script uglify-js importer less

Usage

Include your assets in blade via the asset_path() function

asset_path() will look for your files in /resources/assets, so the file referenced in the snippet below should be in /resources/assets/scss/site.scss.

<link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" href="{!! asset_path('scss/site.scss') !!}" />

Now refresh the page to make sure your file was included and properly compiled.

On deploy, run php artisan assets:publish

This will pre-compile all assets and move them into the public/ directory. As long as you're using asset_path() to reference your assets, they'll start serving the compiled versions.

Images and Fonts

Files stored in /resources/assets/img, /resources/assets/font and /resources/assets/css are served as-is (with proper content types) and are copied directly into the same directories in /public during assets:publish.

CSS minification is not supported at this point for raw files. Minification is provided for scss, less, coffee and js files via their compilers.

TODO

• Add artisan command to setup environment and install required tools (scss, compass, coffee, importer, less, etc.)
• Add minification support for raw css files.