forcemin

Say you have a bunch of revisioned files, each one looks something like ae35dd05.app.js, but in your source code, you are actually referencing those files by their original names, app.js.

How do you update your source code references automatically as part of your build process? This Grunt plugin can help!

forcemin goes inside the source code of your files, finds where your code references other files, and it changes those references to the new revisioned names.

forcemin expects your revisioned files to have the following naming convention:

[version number] [dot] [file name] [whatever...] [dot] [extension]

forcemin works best with grunt-rev

How it works

First, forcemin will make a list of the names of all of your revisioned files in the directories that you specify. Then it'll go inside each of those files looking for references to the original file name, that is without the version string. When a reference is found, it is replaced with the revisioned file name.

Workflow example

A build process utilizing this plugin could go like this

1. Clean the build directory by removing everything in it
2. Copy files from the source directory to the build directory
3. Uglify JavaScript files
4. Minify HTML files
5. Minify CSS files
6. Revision all files
7. Change the references inside the files to the new revisioned names using forcemin

Getting Started

This plugin requires Grunt 0.4.0

If you haven't used Grunt before, be sure to check out the Getting Started guide, as it explains how to create a Gruntfile as well as install and use Grunt plugins. Once you're familiar with that process, you may install this plugin with this command:

npm install grunt-forcemin --save-dev

Once the plugin has been installed, it may be enabled inside your Gruntfile with this line of JavaScript:

grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-forcemin');

Overview

In your project's Gruntfile, add a section named forcemin to the data object passed into grunt.initConfig().

grunt.initConfig({
  forcemin: {
    dist: {
        files: {
            src: [
              'build/client/**/*.{js,css,html,ejs}',
              '!build/client/**/vendor/**'
            ]
        }
    }
  }
})

Additionally, it's possible to convince forcemin to ignore certain file patterns to prevent it from clobbering binary files and others you want to replaced but not modify:

grunt.initConfig({
  forcemin: {
    dist: {
        options: {
            readOnly: ['**/*.{png,gif,jpeg,jpg}']
        },
        files: {
            src: [
              'build/client/**/*.{js,css,html,ejs,png,gif,jpeg,jpg}',
              '!build/client/**/vendor/**'
            ]
        }
    }
  }
})

License

Unlicensed. Public domain.

Backup everything before using this plugin. I guarantee nothing. If my code completely obliterates your project, I'm not responsible.