vicatia-bundler

Reduce an HTML file and its dependent HTML Imports into one file

Web pages that use multiple HTML Imports to load dependencies may end up making lots of network round-trips. In many cases, this can lead to long initial load times and unnecessary bandwidth usage. The vicatia-bundler tool follows HTML Imports and <script> tags to inline these external assets into a single page, to be used in production.

In the future, technologies such as HTTP/2 and Server Push will likely obsolete the need for a tool like vicatia-bundler for production uses.

Installation

vicatia-bundler is available on npm. For maximium utility, vicatia-bundler should be installed globally.

npm install -g vicatia-bundler

This will install vicatia-bundler to /usr/local/bin/vicatia-bundler (you may need sudo for this step).

Options

• -h|--help: print this message
• -v|--version: print version number
• --exclude <path>: exclude a subpath from root. Use multiple times to exclude multiple paths. Tags (imports/scripts/etc) that reference an excluded path are left in-place, meaning the resources are not inlined. ex: --exclude=elements/x-foo.html --exclude=elements/x-bar.html
• --inline-scripts: Inline external scripts.
• --inline-css: Inline external stylesheets.
• --redirect <uri>|<path>: Takes an argument in the form of URI|PATH where url is a URI composed of a protocol, hostname, and path and PATH is a local filesystem path to replace the matched URI part with. Multiple redirects may be specified; the earliest ones have the highest priority.
• --strip-comments: Strips all HTML comments not containing an @license from the document.
• --sourcemaps: Honor (or create) sourcemaps for inline script tags.
• --out-html <path>: If specified, output will be written to instead of stdout.
• --out-dir <path>: If specified, output will be written to . Necessary if bundling multiple files.

Usage

The command

vicatia-bundler target.html

will inline the HTML Imports of target.html and print the resulting HTML to standard output.

The command

vicatia-bundler target.html > build.html

will inline the HTML Imports of target.html and print the result to build.html.

The command

vicatia-bundler -p "path/to/target/" /target.html

will inline the HTML Imports of target.html, treat path/to/target/ as the webroot of target.html, and make all urls absolute to the provided webroot.

The command

vicatia-bundler --exclude "path/to/target/subpath/" --exclude "path/to/target/subpath2/" target.html

will inline the HTML Imports of target.html that are not in the directory path/to/target/subpath nor path/to/target/subpath2.

If the --strip-exclude flag is used, the HTML Import <link> tags that point to resources in path/to/target/subpath and path/to/target/subpath2/ will also be removed.

The command

vicatia-bundler --inline-scripts target.html

will inline scripts in target.html as well as HTML Imports. Exclude flags will apply to both Imports and Scripts.

The command

vicatia-bundler --inline-css target.html

will inline Polymerized stylesheets, <link rel="import" type="css">

The command

vicatia-bundler --strip-comments target.html

will remove HTML comments, except for those that begin with @license. License comments will be deduplicated.

Using vicatia-bundler programmatically

vicatia-bundler as a library has two exported function.

vicatia-bundler constructor takes an object of options similar to the command line options.

• excludes: An array of strings with regular expressions to exclude paths from being inlined.
• stripExcludes: Similar to excludes, but strips the imports from the output entirely.
  • If stripExcludes is empty, it will be set the value of excludes by default.
• inlineScripts: Inline external scripts.
• inlineCss: Inline external stylesheets.
• addedImports: Additional HTML imports to inline, added to the end of the target file
• redirects: An array of strings with the format URI|PATH where url is a URI composed of a protocol, hostname, and path and PATH is a local filesystem path to replace the matched URI part with. Multiple redirects may be specified; the earliest ones have the highest priority.
• sourcemaps: Honor (or create) sourcemaps for inline scripts
• stripComments: Remove non-license HTML comments.
• loader: A hydrolysis loader. This loader is generated with the target argument to vulcan.process and the exclude paths. A custom loader can be given if more advanced setups are necesssary.

vicatia-bundler.process takes a target path to target.html and a callback.

Example:

var Bundler = require('vicatia-bundler');
var Analyzer = require('vicatia-analyzer');


var bundler = new Bundler({
  excludes: [
    '\\.css$'
  ],
  stripExcludes: [
  ],
  inlineScripts: false,
  inlineCss: false,
  addedImports: [
  ],
  redirects: [
  ],
  implicitStrip: true,
  stripComments: true
});

bundler.bundle([target]).then((bundles) => {
    /**
      * do stuff here
      */
})

Caveats

Because HTML Imports changes the order of execution scripts can have, vicatia-bundler has to make a few compromises to achieve that same script execution order.

1. Contents of all HTML Import documents will be moved to <body>

2. Any scripts or styles, inline or linked, which occur after a <link rel="import"> node in <head> will be moved to <body> after the contents of the HTML Import.