Phew

Phew is a simple, opinionated, stand-alone asset pipeline that builds CSS (SCSS) and JavaScript (ECMAScript 6) assets into bundles, and publishes them to S3, so they can be referenced from your HTML pages.

I was tired of bundling my JS and CSS assets into my Golang binaries, and realized that a simple thing like using version numbers instead of fingerprints in my asset filenames would allow me to completely remove my assets from my web server repo, while preserving the nice cache invalidation that comes with fingerprinted files.

With Phew, I just need to maintain a single constant in my web server, the asset version number, and I can eliminate all the headaches that come from checking in your frontend code with your backend code. For services like Elastic Beanstalk and Heroku that uses your Git repo as a delivery mechanism, this repo can help you tremendously (no merge conflicts in compiled assets, etc).

The way it works

Phew will build any file located in the root of the javascripts or stylesheets folders from where the command is run. This means that you can create multiple JS and CSS bundles by having files that imports other files from subfolders. CSS files can use the @import statement. JS files can use the import statement.

See the example folder for a simple example.

Getting started

1. Create a config.json file in your new assets folder, with at least a version property. This determines the version number in the compiled asset filenames.
2. Create a javascripts and stylesheets folder and add files
3. Run phew build

Voila!

Commands

phew build

Will build the assets.

• --minify (optional) Minifies the assets
• --versionize (optional) Adds version number to the files

phew server

Use the server command for local development. Simply point your HTML asset links to the phew server, and it'll recompile assets whenever they change.

• --port (optional) Sets the localhost port. Defaults to 3450.
• --minify (optional) See above
• --versionize (optional) See above

phew publish

Publishes all files in the build directory to S3. In a normal workflow you will run phew build then phew publish.

• --s3Id Specifies the S3 ID to use. Can also be set in config.json
• --s3Secret Specifies the S3 Access key to use. Can also be set in config.json
• --s3Bucket Specifies the S3 bucket to use. Can also be set in config.json
• --s3Prefix (optional) Specifies s3 prefix for all files. Defaults to ""
• --cacheControl (optional) Specifies the Cache-Control header. Defaults to public, max-age=31536000