Super fast sugar for optimizing CSS and JavaScript -- for Connect and Express.

Jerry Sievert's Servitude combines CSS and JavaScript into a single fast and cacheable file, speeding up your site without a ton of extra work.

It's easy, just drop your JavaScript and CSS into a directory, point to it, and list out what you want to include in the order you want to include it. servitude will inject it into the DOM and your application will be better for it. No more tons of requests, a single request and everything becomes ready to use.

Optimize without even thinking about it.

$ npm install servitude-connect

var servitude = require('servitude-connect');
var express = require('express');

var app = module.exports = express.createServer();

app.use(servitude('/servitude/(.+)', {
  basedir: __dirname + '/public',
  cache: true,
}));

app.listen(3000);

<!-- include js/jquery.js and css/site.css in one fell swoop -->
<script type="text/javascript" src="/servitude/js/jquery.js,css/site.css"></script>

Enabling caching stores requested files in memory, and only re-retrieves and re-processes a file if it has been changed on disk.

If caching is enabled, and the if-modified-since header has been set, a check is made against all files requested and either the response is returned as normal, or a 304 status is returned.

app.use(servitude('/servitude/(.+)', {
  basedir: __dirname + '/public',
  cache: true,
}));

If uglify is enabled in the options, an attempt is made to uglify any JavaScript that has been requested. Note, this occurs even if the JavaScript has been previously minified. This may not be desired behavior, so this is turned off by default.

app.use(servitude('/servitude/(.+)', {
  basedir: __dirname + '/public',
  cache: true,
  uglify: true
}));

Filters are more powerful and allow you to make any modification desired to the CSS and JavaScript being returned. A single filter method is provided for both CSS and JavaScript, and the second argument is set to determine the type of file being processed.

var filter = function (data, type) {
  if (type === 'css') {
    return data;
  } else if (type === 'javascript' ){
    return '(function () { ' + data ' + '})();';
  }
}

app.use(servitude('/servitude/(.+)', {
  basedir: __dirname + '/public',
  cache: true,
  filter: filter
}));

A servitude object is returned with all output for injection into the DOM.

console.dir(servitude.css);
console.dir(servitude.js);

if (servitude.errors.length) {
  console.log("errors: ");
  console.dir(servitude.errors);
}

Injection occurs via the servitude.inject() method upon load.

• Jerry Sievert - code@legitimatesounding.com - Blog

• Josh Hundley - josh.hundley@gmail.com - Blog