Parcel Plugin for Assets Manifest

This plugin adds a new asset file type handler *.urls which reads a file of newline-separated file paths and adds them to the parcel outputs. Each file referenced in the list will be hashed by parcel and copied to the output folder (e.g. dist/)

To use this plugin, install it into your parcel project:

yarn add parcel-plugin-assets-list
# or
npm install parcel-plugin-assets-list

Then create an URLs file, for example a file assets.urls:

# HTML templates
templates/a.html
templates/b.html

# Stylesheets
scss/styles.scss

# Javascript
js/whatever.js

Server-side usage

To use the assets on the server side, pass the file directly to parcel build / watch, e.g.

parcel build assets.urls

Now you will get a file assets.json in the dist folder that you can load on the server-side to calculate asset URLs.

Client-side usage

To get asset URLs in client-side javascript, import the URLs as a JavaScript module, e.g.

import urls from './assets.urls'
const templateUrl = urls['templates/a.html']

Custom keys

By default the key in the generated mapping is the filename listed in the file. However, you can specify a specific key using a <key>: <path> format in the source file, e.g.

# assets.urls
templateUrl: templates/a.html

This makes importing the asset paths from JavaScript much more convenient:

# component.js
import { templateUrl } from 'assets.urls';

Asset Processing

Note that the target assets are compiled by Parcel, so .scss files will reference .css afterwards, .json files will end up references a .js file, and so on.

Asset Bundling

Note that if you import a .urls file in JavaScript, parcel may "package" the generated JavaScript module AND the generated urls and json files into one file. Instead of a set of files per input urls file you get a single urls and json file output with a hash in the name with everything merged into one file.

Thus if you want to use the generated json or urls files you should reference them as entry points (on the parcel command line) or from a urls file that is an entry point.

URL Prefix

If you pass --public-url that URL will be prefixed to the resolved asset URLs.

Example

The example folder has a sample project that shows how files are processed and what the output files look like.

Known Issues

Due to a limitation or bug in parcel, filename hashes are not reliably updated when dependencies of that file are changed.

A file will be updated to reference the new filenames, but its own filename hash does not change. So browser clients might have a stale version of the file and not see the new changes.

See https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel/issues/1481

For this reason importing the outputs of this plugin in js files isn't safe if you are relying on filename hashes for cache-busting.