kriswallsmith/assetic

Assetic is an asset management library for PHP web applications. In web development, assets are files like JavaScript, CSS, and images that a website sends to the browser. Managing these files means tasks like combining multiple files into one, compressing them to reduce size, and converting source formats (like LESS or SASS, which are extended versions of CSS) into plain CSS that browsers understand. Assetic handles all of this in PHP code. The library organizes assets into collections and then applies filters to them. A filter is a processing step, such as compiling LESS into CSS or minifying JavaScript to remove whitespace and comments. Filters can be stacked: a CSS file might first be compiled from SCSS, then compressed by a separate tool. The library ships with a large number of built-in filters covering common tools like LESS, SASS, SCSS, TypeScript, CoffeeScript, UglifyJS, and several CSS and JavaScript compressors. There are three main ways to use Assetic. You can build asset objects directly in code and dump them to a string. You can use an asset manager to organize named assets and a filter manager to organize named filters, then reference them by name. Or you can use an asset factory that takes a root directory and handles most of the object creation for you, including a debug mode that can skip heavy processing steps like minification during development. Assetic also supports writing the processed output to static files on disk so a web server can serve them directly, along with a cache-busting feature that appends a version identifier to file names so browsers fetch fresh copies when the content changes. This repository is no longer actively maintained. Development has continued at a separate repository under the package name assetic/framework.