Rewrite Based on Manifest File

[mutewinter]

Renaming and replacing occurrences of DIGEST ad-hoc was a bad approach. Instead, we should generate a manifest file a la Rails and then do the rename / replacements based on its contents. We could optionally leave the manifest file around as an artifact that allows

Examples in the wild:

• https://github.com/zendesk/grunt-digest
• http://guides.rubyonrails.org/asset_pipeline.html#manifest-files-and-directives

[jsilvestre]

If I understand correctly, that would be everyone's job to get the digest and append it in the index.html file? That sounds good to me because reading a JSON before rendering my Jade template is easy and cleaner than what I currently do (see #13) :)

Also as a suggestion (that the rewrite would allow): appending the digest to the file URL, not the file name (to ease versioning). Instead of having:

<script type="text/javascript" src="assets/myscript-2a4z2r.js"></script>

We would have:

<script type="text/javascript" src="assets/myscript.js?2a4z2r"></script>

I'm not sure this would work out of the box with all HTTP server but it works with ExpressJS and I bet this is rather common (and configurable if it's not the default behavior).

If the plugin generates a manifest with a list of "file => digest" I think it's easily doable anyway. Also, if you plan on keeping the "append" feature within the plugin, it could have two appending modes: append to file or append to URL.

Cheers and thanks again for your work!

[mutewinter]

Love the idea @jsilvestre. I opened #14 to make sure I don't lose track of it.

[mutewinter]

Closed by #24

[solisoft]

How does it works? How can I set the digest as parameter ?