How to use grunt-usemin in PHP projects?

Question

All the tutorials on optimizing website assets with grunt and grunt-usemin are based on the src -> dist deploy strategy. basically processing the items in your src folder and compiles them into the dist folder.

But PHP doesn't work this way. It isn't compiled and "distributed". The source and target page are the same. Which makes it a destructive process.

How do you work around this? Any tips on using Grunt in PHP project in general?

Thx.

Answer 1

We do something similar. We created an index.src.html with the non-minized sources, and create an index.html from this file using usemin, and we have a "proxy" php file which opens the index.html if it exists (which means we are in the production environment and the assets are built), otherwise the index.src.html if the assets haven't been built or we are in a development environment. The main idea is to separate the important parts for usemin to a different file.

Answer 2

The usermin plugin is for preparing static assets (concatenate, minimise,...). Static means the server gives the same content for everybody. This constraint doesn't apply to PHP...

If you would like to use this tools to optimize your php generated pages assets, you should create input files which can be parse-able by usermin. For example you can collect the javascript/css file references into a template or a different php/html, and you include/use this file where you need, and after the build you use the usermin parsed version of it.

Answer 3

The ideal approach would take advantage of the dynamic nature of PHP to make the "distribution" URL replacement. The process would be:

• Your build tool creates some kind of manifest or machine readable file with changes applied. Some tools, as gulp-rev will do this for you.
• Read the manifest from PHP and replace the resource URLs with the final ones.