Broccoli

A fast, reliable asset pipeline, supporting constant-time rebuilds and compact build definitions. Comparable to the Rails asset pipeline in scope, though it runs on Node and is backend-agnostic. For background and architecture, see the introductory blog post.

For the command line interface, see broccoli-cli.

Installation

npm install --save-dev broccoli
npm install --global broccoli-cli

Brocfile.js

A Brocfile.js file in the project root contains the build specification. It should export a tree.

A tree can be any string representing a directory path, like 'app' or 'src'. Or a tree can be an object conforming to the Plugin API Specification. A Brocfile.js will usually directly work with only directory paths, and then use the plugins in the Plugins section to generate transformed trees.

The following simple Brocfile.js would export the app/ subdirectory as a tree:

module.exports = 'app'

With that Brocfile, the build result would equal the contents of the app tree in your project folder. For example, say your project contains these files:

app
├─ main.js
└─ helper.js
Brocfile.js
package.json
…

Running broccoli build the-output (a command provided by broccoli-cli) would generate the following folder within your project folder:

the-output
├─ main.js
└─ helper.js

Using plugins in a Brocfile.js

The following Brocfile.js exports the app/ subdirectory as appkit/:

var Funnel = require('broccoli-funnel')

module.exports = new Funnel('app', {
  destDir: 'appkit'
})

That example uses the plugin broccoli-funnel. In order for the require call to work, you must first put the plugin in your devDependencies and install it, with

npm install --save-dev broccoli-funnel

With the above Brocfile.js and the file tree from the previous example, running broccoli build the-output would generate the following folder:

the-output
└─ appkit
   ├─ main.js
   └─ helper.js

Plugins

You can find plugins under the broccoli-plugin keyword on npm.

Running Broccoli, Directly or Through Other Tools

• broccoli-timepiece
• grunt-broccoli
• grunt-broccoli-build

Helpers

Shared code for writing plugins.

• broccoli-plugin
• broccoli-caching-writer
• broccoli-filter

Plugin API Specification

See docs/node-api.md.

Also see docs/broccoli-1-0-plugin-api.md on how to upgrade from Broccoli 0.x to the Broccoli 1.x API.

Security

• Do not run broccoli serve on a production server. While this is theoretically safe, it exposes a needlessly large amount of attack surface just for serving static assets. Instead, use broccoli build to precompile your assets, and serve the static files from a web server of your choice.

Get Help

• IRC: #broccolijs on Freenode. Ask your question and stick around for a few hours. Someone will see your message eventually.
• Twitter: mention @jo_liss with your question
• GitHub: Open an issue on a specific plugin repository, or on this repository for general questions.

License

Broccoli was originally written by Jo Liss and is licensed under the MIT license.

The Broccoli logo was created by Samantha Penner (Miric) and is licensed under CC0 1.0.