gulp-usemin-reloaded

A better usemin.

Why?

Once I've begun to develop using Gulp tasks and plugins, I've discovered that a lot of them are done in a really crappy way. The feature itself is cool but the code is unmanageable in the future. So, this is my effort to bring a better usemin with a cleaner logic and extensibility, but also proving a retrocompatibility layer with all existing usemin projects.

Features

• Full UseMin compatible.
• Extensible through callbacks (you do what you want with your own rules)
• Extensible rules (why stick only with build:something when you can write myrule:context?)
• Gulp Vinyl Stream compatible using gulp-through

How to install

npm install gulp-usemin-reloaded

Documentation

Rules

As you already know there are some standard rules that usemin tasks were using like build:css, build:js or build:remove. With this plugin we're going to extend those by using a more generic approach:

action:context outputPath [attributes]

where

• action is the name of your own task (i.e. build)
• context is the tag to recognize your task (i.e. css)
• outputPath is where you want this to be saved, relative to your gulp.dest path (i.e. css/screen.css)
• [attributes] are tha HTML attributes to append to the output tag that will be replaced (i.e. media="screen")

Callback

Usually usemin does everything out-of-the-box by itself, but since we're going to have custom Rules, we're also going to have custom callbacks to manage them. It's really simple to do that when you declare this plugin in your own gulpfile.js.

var usemin = require('gulp-usemin-reloaded');
 
.pipe(
    usemin({
        rules: {
            build: {
                css: [minifyCss(), 'concat'],
                js: [uglify(), rev()],
                html: [minifyHtml({empty: true})],
                remove: function( object, content ) {
                    return '';
                }
            }
        }
    })
)

In this case the remove task (aka context) is declared as a callback.

as INPUT parameters you have:

• object is the parsed object of the current task rule (aka 'action`). It's a dictionary containing all the parsed HTML as a lookup dictionary.
• content is the current evaluated content that can be manipulated directly from the callback.

as OUTPUT it expect the handled content, in this case an empty string (we want to discard everything that is between <!-- build:remove --> and <!-- endbuild -->. The replacement will be done ALWAYS by the plugin and not by you. So do NOT ever return the modified 'content' parameter. That is only a READ-ONLY var that you can use to base your decision (do 'if' or some other logical operators).

You can declare as many actions and contexts you like. Their value can be:

• array of other tasks to be run
• callback as described

Object

Of course the whole refactory is based on one logic. Every HTML tag is parsed as a dictionary and could be read and/or extend with different values. This is an example on how it will look like:

HTML

<!-- build:remove -->
<script src="js/null.js"></script>
<!-- endbuild -->

DICTIONARY

{
    action: 'build',
    context: 'remove',
    nodes: [
        {
            _tagName: 'script',
            src: 'js/null.js'
        }
    ],
    startTag: 'build: remove',
    endTag: 'endbuild',
    files: [
        // List of Vinyl INPUT Files ( src/href for each HTML tag )
    ]
}

License

See LICENSE file.