Assets Improved

Assets Improved is Metalsmith plugin for handling static assets, such as images and CSS files. It is a replacement for plugins such as "Metalsmith Assets" and "Metalsmith Static", although it has an API different from those plugins.

Usage

When building a Metalsmith project, you have a directory that contains your package.json file, a source directory, and an output directory. This documentation refers to this directory as "the Metalsmith project directory" or "the Metalsmith root." The Metalsmith root directory is represented in code samples as __dirname.

Assets Improved is used like any other Metalsmith plugin, for example:

let assets = require( 'metalsmith-assets-improved' );
let Metalsmith = require( 'metalsmith' );

Metalsmith( __dirname )
    .use( assets() )
    .build( function( err ) {
        if ( err ) return done( err );
    } );

By default, Assets Improved looks in __dirname/assets for static assets. These assets will be copied to the output or build folder, which is __dirname/build by default. If you change the output directory with the the destination function, then the assets will be copied to that directory.

Configuration

Like any other Metalsmith plugin, you can override the default behavior by passing a configuration object to the assets function, like so:

Metalsmith( __dirname )
    .use( assets( {
        src: 'static',
        dest: 'static',
        replace: 'old'
    } ) )
    .build( function( err ) {
        if ( err ) return done( err );
    } );

As shown in the example above, the configuration object has three fields. All of them are optional.

• src: Directory to copy files from. Relative paths are resolved against the Metalsmith project directory (i.e. src can be a sibling to the directory used as Metalsmith's source). Defaults to __dirname/assets.
• dest: Directory to copy files to. Relative paths are resolved against the directory configured via's Metalsmith destination function. Defaults to . (i.e. the same as destination).
• replace: Which, if any, files in the dest folder should be overwritten during the build process. Possible values are:
  • 'all' (all files will be overwritten)
  • 'old' (files in dest older than their counterparts in src will be overwritten)
  • 'none' (no files in dest will be overwritten, but files in src without a counterpart will be copied to dest; default)

It is highly recommended to set metalsmith.clean(false) if you are using the replace option. Otherwise, Metalsmith will delete all of your old build files each time it runs, which makes the replace option pretty pointless.

License

The content of this repository is licensed under the 3-Clause BSD license. Please see the enclosed license file for specific terms.