metalsmith-brotli

A Metalsmith plugin that creates compressed copies of the site's content using the Brotli algorithm. This is useful if you want to pre-compress static files and serve them via the nginx brotli static module (ngx_brotli), for example.

Installation

$ npm install metalsmith-brotli

Usage

const Metalsmith = require("metalsmith");
const brotli = require("metalsmith-brotli");
 
let metalsmith = new Metalsmith(__dirname)
  .use(brotli());

metalsmith-brotli will compress a file if the extension matches this regular expression:

/\.[html|css|js|json|xml|svg|txt]/

The choice of files to compress is loosely based on the HTML5 Boilerplate server configuration.

The plugin compresses each matching file. Depending on the overwrite options (see below) the plugin either replaces the original file or creates a new one with the .br extension.

Customization

Pass an options object to customize metalsmith-brotli's behaviour. These are the available options keys:

src is a multimatch pattern which specifies which types of files to compress.

let metalsmith = new Metalsmith(__dirname)
  .use(compress({
    src: ["**/*.js", "**/*.css"] // only compress JavaScript and CSS
  }));

options is of type BrotliOptions. For example, you can set the compression level as follows:

const zlib = require("zlib");
 
let metalsmith = new Metalsmith(__dirname)
  .use(compress({
    src: ["**/*.js", "**/*.css"],
    options: {
      params: {
        [zlib.constants.BROTLI_PARAM_QUALITY]: 11
      }
    }
  }));

Add overwrite: true to replace files with the compressed version instead of creating a copy with the .br extension:

let metalsmith = new Metalsmith(__dirname)
  .use(compress({
    overwrite: true
  });

Deployment

You need to create a script to upload the compressed versions of the files to your preferred hosting provider yourself. Take care to serve the files with the correct Content-Encoding.

Acknowledgements

This plugin is based on metalsmith-gzip by Ludovico Fischer, licensed under the MIT License.

License

metalsmith-brotli is released under the MIT license. See the LICENSE file for more information.