HTML asset manager provides a simple way to optimize CSS & JavaScripts assets in your statically generated site. You can think of it as an extra step in your build process.
What does it do?
The asset manager does the following:
Looks through all of your site's files for HTML, CSS, JS, and image files
The CSS and JS files are categorized into asset groups (group assignment is done via name convention discussed below):
- Inline
- Synchronous
- Asynchronous
- Preload
For each HTML file, the asset manager runs a set of "manipulators" listed below:
- Removes any existing CSS and JS on the page
- Async Src
- Default Size for iframes
- Add width and height attributes to images
- Generates multiple image sizes
- Generates picture element markup
- Injects the required CSS and JS based on the HTML and classes used in the page
- Add
lazyload
to images
- Updates image for Open Graph to a suitable size
- Wraps images and iframes with divs to apply appropriate ratios to the elements
- Swaps out YouTube and Vimeo iframes with a static image
- Revision assets for safe long term caching
Why do all of this?
Using go-html-asset-manager will improve the overall performance of a site without requiring a specific build process or site generator.
Installation
You will need to install golang to use this tool. Learn more at go.dev.
Once go is installed, you can install the htmlassets
tool with:
go install github.com/gauntface/go-html-asset-manager/v4/cmds/htmlassets@latest
If you'd like to generate image sizes, you can install the genimgs
tool with:
go install github.com/gauntface/go-html-asset-manager/v4/cmds/genimgs@latest
Usage
To use this tool, create an asset-manager.json
file at the root of your project. This file will be used by both htmlassets
and genimgs
.
{
"html-dir": "public/",
"base-url": "https://www.gaunt.dev",
"assets": {
"static-dir": "public/",
"json-dir": "data/"
},
"gen-assets": {
"static-dir": "static/",
"output-dir": "static/generated/",
"output-bucket": "www.gaunt.dev",
"output-bucket-dir": "generated/",
"max-width": 700,
"max-density": 3
},
"img-to-picture": [
{
"id": "c-project-item__img",
"max-width": 620,
"source-sizes": [
"(min-width: 700px) 400px",
"100vw"
]
}
]
}
This configuration file describes you project so go-html-asset-manager knows where to find the CSS and JS files.
The next step is to name your CSS and JS files in the following structure:
<HTML Element | CSS Classname>[-<inline | sync | async | preload>][.<media>].<css | js>
For example, your styles for <h1>
elements might be:
h1.css
: Primary CSS that you want to be inlined (If no loading strategy is defined, inline is the default)
h1-async.css
: For optional styles.
h1-sync.print.css
: Styles that are needed for print can be synchronously loaded by the browser when required.
h1-async.js
: To load a script that adds anchor tags to the page.
If it's still unclear what is happening .
Config
html-dir
This field is required and needs to be the path of the final HTML files. These files will be altered by htmlassets
.
base-url
If you want to use genimgs
to create a suitable image for social media posts, the base URL is needed to define a full URL to the generated image.
assets
assets
tells htmlassets
the various locations to look for images, CSS and JS.
assets > static-dir
static-dir
is the path of CSS, JS and images served when deployed via "/".
For example, if the static-dir
was public/static/
and there was a JS file public/static/script/example.js
, then htmlassets
would assume this file could be referenced as /script/example.js
.
assets > json-dir
You can define JSON files to describe assets you don't serve locally but should be injected into your HTML. A typical example is web fonts.
For example, data/code.json
may define:
{
"css": {
"preload": [
"https://fonts.googleapis.com/css2?family=Fira+Code&display=swap"
]
}
}
img-to-picture
If you want to convert <img>
elements to <picture>
, you can provide an array of queries with information on the appropriate sizes to apply.
"img-to-picture": [
{
"id": "c-project-item__img",
"max-width": 620,
"source-sizes": [
"(min-width: 700px) 400px",
"100vw"
]
},
{
"id": "c-blog-item__img",
"max-width": 620,
"source-sizes": [
"(min-width: 620px) 200px",
"100vw"
]
},
....
]
gen-assets
This config is used by genimgs
to manage generated images stored locally and on AWS s3.
gen-assets > static-dir
The local path to find images used in your site.
gen-assets > output-dir
The local path to place any images generated. If you are using S3 to store your image files, you can add this directory to your .gitignore
file as genimgs
will check S3 for missing images.
gen-assets > output-bucket
The name of the S3 bucket to store these files.
gen-assets > output-bucket-dir
The directory in the bucket to store the generated files
gen-assets > max-width
The maximum width you would like your images to be. This value will be multiplied by the max-density
to get the max-width for all desired screen densities.
gen-assets > max-density
The maximum screen density you'd like to account for when generating images.
Future Work
There are some features/changes I'd like to make.
- Embed JS for async loading + YouTube etc
- Split the config out for
genimgs
so there is a clear separation.
- Ability to add styles if one or more elements/classnames are in the page. I.e. if you wanted to add styles for h1-h6, this approach requires 6 files, vs just one file with styles defined as
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {...}
.
Thank you to Ashley McNamara for the gopher image.