assemble v0.24.3
assemble
Looking for the grunt plugin? Please visit grunt-assemble.
(Note that the current website assemble.io, is for grunt-assemble. Thanks for your patience while we work on updating the site with documentation for the latest assemble).
Overview
(Click the following sections to expand them)
(TOC generated by verb using markdown-toc)
- Airbus Group
- Diebold
- Transformicons
- Barrel
- yesware
- Amaze
- sennheiser
- perf.rocks
- Milano JS
- AKQA
- huxtaburger
- Typeplate
- Angular Basics
Is your website, blog or project built with assemble? Please let us know about it!
- Expressive, functional API (the API is also stable)
- You can use assemble with any web framework or CSS/HTML toolkit
- Assemble can build static sites or hybrid static/dynamic sites
- Streams support, you can run any gulp plugin
- Powerful features for rapid web development, including a robust API for rendering templates with any node.js template engine.
- Assemble can use any base plugin
- Assemble can do anything Jekyll does, but with more flexibility and control
- Like gulp, assemble can also run any other static site generator as a plugin, which means you can do anything and everything all other node.js static site generators can do, and much more.
- Rapid prototyping
- Static site generation (more powerful alternative to jekyll)
- Landing pages
- A/B testing
- blogs
- Styleguides
- Themes
- UI components
- Project scaffolder (generate is also built on assemble)
- build tool
- Documentation (verb is built on assemble)
- Generate boilerplates, scaffolds, and targets
- E-books (Angular Basics was built with assemble)
- Much more!
- generate: scaffold out new projects from the command line
- assemble: <= you are here
- verb: generate documention for your projects
- update: keep your projects up-to-date
- Intuitive CLI
- Full support for gulp and base plugins
- Assemble templates are vinyl files
- Render templates with any template engine, including nunjucks, handlebars, lodash and any consolidate engine!
- Use multiple engines, assemble can detect the one to use based on file extension
- helpers: support for sync and async
- Templates collections
- Pages
- Partials/includes
- Layouts
- Pagination
- permalinks
- middleware can be used to tranform files at any stage in the render cycle
- Generate pages from JSON
- Much more!
Quickstart
Installing assemble
Add assemble your project's devDependencies
using npm:
$ npm install -D assemble
You should now be able to run assemble directly (using node assemblefile.js
etc) or using npm
scripts. For example, add the following to package.json:
{
"scripts": {
"build": "assemble"
}
}
Then run
$ npm run build
Installing assemble's CLI
You can also assemble's CLI globally, which adds the assemble
command to your system path, allowing it to be run from any directory.
$ npm install --global assemble
Note that even if assemble is installed globally, it's good practice to install it locally in every project to ensure that your projects are protected against any potentially breaking changes that might occur in assemble between development cycles.
assemblefile.js
To use assemble's CLI, you'll need to add an assemblefile.js
to your project. The fastest way to do this is to run the following command:
$ assemble
If no assemblefile.js
exists in the current project, assemble will ask if you want to add one. If you answer yes, assemble will then generate a basic assembfile.js
for you.
CLI
Run assemble from the command line.
$ assemble <tasks> [options]
Running tasks
Specify one or more space-separated tasks to run.
Examples
Run task foo
$ assemble foo
Run tasks foo
and bar
$ assemble foo bar
Specifying options
Non-task options are prefixed with --
.
Examples
Set the --cwd
to run an assemblefile.js in a different directory:
$ assemble --cwd=docs
Emit views as they're loaded and log them to stderr
:
$ assemble --emit=view
See more command line options(#command line options)
Object expansion
Object-paths may be specified using dot-notation for either the key or value in a command line argument.
Additionally, assemble uses expand-object (and some custom parsing) to make it easier to pass non-trivial options and commands via command line. So all of the following formats are possible.
Examples
Boolean values:
$ assemble --foo
# { foo: true }
Key-value pairs:
$ assemble --foo=bar
# { foo: 'bar' }
Nested booleans:
$ assemble --option=foo
# {options: { foo: true }}
Nested key-value pairs:
$ assemble --option=foo:bar
# {options: { foo: 'bar' }}
Deeply nested key-value pairs:
$ assemble --option=foo.bar.baz:qux
# {options: foo: { bar: { baz: 'qux' }}}}
Or on the left-side of the =
:
$ assemble --option.foo.bar.baz=qux
# {options: foo: { bar: { baz: 'qux' }}}}
Command line options
cwd
Change the cwd
for the assemblefile.js
to run, optionally specifying any tasks to run:
$ assemble <tasks> --cwd [directory]
Example
To run the scaffolds
example in the examples/
directory, you would enter:
$ assemble --cwd examples/scaffolds
If successful, in the command line, you should see something like this:
file
Specify the name of the config file for assemble's CLI to run, the default is assemblefile.js
.
Example
$ assemble --file assemblefile.dev.js
API
Assemble
Create an assemble
app. This is the main function exported by the assemble module.
Params
options
{Object}: Optionally pass default options to use.
Example
var assemble = require('assemble');
var app = assemble();
Templates API
Assemble exposes the entire API from the templates library for working with templates and template collections. The API is much more extensive than what is documented here, see templates for more documentation.
Templates and Views
In the following documentation, the terms "template" and "view" both refer to aspects of the same thing. Here's what they mean:
template
: an actual template stringview
: a object with acontent
property that contains the template string. Since views are instances of vinyl, you can think of a view as a "vinyl file for templates".
.create
Create a template collection for caching views:
app.create('includes', {viewType: 'partial'});
Options
cwd
{String}: the base directory to use when loading templates onto the collection from a globviewType
: {String|Array}: One or more view types to associate with the collection
Add views
Add a view to the collection:
app.include('foo.md', {contents: new Buffer('this is contents')});
Add multiple views:
app.includes({
path: 'foo.md', contents: new Buffer('this is contents'),
path: 'bar.md', contents: new Buffer('this is contents'),
path: 'baz.md', contents: new Buffer('this is contents')
});
// or pass a glob (optionally override `cwd` defined on `.create`)
app.includes('*.{md,hbs}', {cwd: 'templates/includes'});
View types
View types are defined on a collection to determine how a templates in the collection will be handled throughout the render cycle.
Available types
Assemble supports three view types:
partial
: Views with this type are can be used as "partials" (or "partial views"), which can be injected into other views. Useful for components, document fragments, or other snippets of reusable code or content. These views are passed to rendering engines to be used as partials, or variables on the context if partials are not directly supported.layout
: allows views to "wrap" other views (of any type, including other layouts or partials) with common code or content.renderable
: Views that have a one-to-one relationship with rendered files that will eventually be visible to a user or visitor to a website. For example: pages or blog posts. Therenderable
view type is automatically set if no other view types are set.
Defining view types
You can define view types when a collection is created:
app.create('snippet', {viewType: 'partial'});
Or directly on the collection options:
app.create('snippet');
app.snippets.option('viewType', ['partial']); // string or array
.engine
Register template engine for rendering views with the given ext
:
app.engine(ext, fn);
Params
ext
{String}: The file extension of files to render with the enginefn
{Function}: Async function that follows consolidate engine conventions, and takes three arguments:str
,locals
andcallback
.
Example
// this engine is already registered in assemble
app.engine('hbs', require('engine-handlebars'));
// create a custom engine
app.engine('txt', function(str, locals, cb) {
// render `str` with `locals`
cb(null, str);
});
You can tell assemble to use the same engine for all file extensions by setting a value on options.engine
.
Example
// use engine `hbs` for rendering all files
app.option('engine', 'hbs');
Or, if you're using .renderFile, you can force a specific engine to be used by passing the engine name.
Example
Use the hbs
engine to render all templates:
app.src('templates/*.*')
.pipe(app.renderFile('hbs'))
.render
Render a view with the given locals
and callback
.
app.render(view, {title: 'Foo'}, function(err, view) {
// `view` is an object with a rendered `content` property
});
Params
view
{Object|String}: The view to renderlocals
{Object}: Locals to pass to template engine for rendering templates inview
callback
{Function}
File System API
Assemble offers the following low-level methods for working with the file system:
Assemble has first-class support for vinyl-fs, so any gulp plugin can be used in your assemble pipeline.
.src
Create a vinyl stream. Takes glob patterns or filepaths to the source files to read.
Params
glob
{String|Array}: Glob patterns or file paths to source files.options
{Object}: Options or locals to merge into the context and/or pass tosrc
plugins
Example
app.src('src/*.hbs');
// define `src` options
app.src('src/*.hbs', { layout: 'default' });
.dest
Specify a destination for processed files.
Params
dest
{String|Function}: File path or rename function.options
{Object}: Options and locals to pass todest
plugins
Example
app.dest('dist/');
.copy
Copy files with the given glob patterns
to the specified dest
.
Params
patterns
{String|Array}: Glob patterns of files to copy.dest
{String|Function}: Desination directory.returns
{Stream}: Stream, to continue processing if necessary.
Example
app.task('assets', function() {
// return, to let assemble know when the task has completed
return app.copy('assets/**', 'dist/');
});
.renderFile
Renders files as they are pushed through the stream.
app.src('*.hbs')
.pipe(app.renderfile())
.pipe(app.dest('foo'));
Force a specific engine to be used for rendering files:
app.engine('txt', function(str, locals, cb) {
cb(null, str);
});
app.src('*.hbs')
.pipe(app.renderfile('txt')) //<= use engine `txt`
.pipe(app.dest('foo'));
Task API
Assemble has the following methods for running tasks and controlling workflows:
.task
Define a task to be run when the task is called.
Params
name
{String}: Task namefn
{Function}: function that is called when the task is run.
Example
app.task('default', function() {
app.src('templates/*.hbs')
.pipe(app.dest('site/'));
});
.build
Run one or more tasks.
Params
tasks
{Array|String}: Task name or array of task names.cb
{Function}: callback function that exposeserr
Example
app.build(['foo', 'bar'], function(err) {
if (err) throw err;
console.log('done!');
});
.watch
Watch files, run one or more tasks when a watched file changes.
Params
glob
{String|Array}: Filepaths or glob patterns.tasks
{Array}: Task(s) to watch.
Example
app.task('watch', function() {
app.watch('docs/*.md', ['docs']);
});
Plugins
Discovering plugins
Plugins from any applications built on base should work with Assemble and can be used in your assemblefile.js
:
- base: find base plugins on npm using the
baseplugin
keyword - assemble: find assemble plugins on npm using the
assembleplugin
keyword - generate: find generate plugins on npm using the
generateplugin
keyword - templates: find templates plugins on npm using the
templatesplugin
keyword - update: find update plugins on npm using the
updateplugin
keyword - verb: find verb plugins on npm using the
verbplugin
keyword
Authoring plugins
Visit the plugin documentation guide to learn how to use, author and publish plugins.
Learning
Help
Get in touch!
Have questions, suggestions, or want to discuss assemble? Join the conversation on gitter or give us a shout on twitter. The assemble team and community are always happy to help!
More information
Documentation(Temporarily, while we work on the new website, docs can be found in support/docs/src)- API documentation
- Generators maintained by the core team
FAQ
Website is outdated and being refactored!
Assemble's website, assemble.io, only has information related to gulp-assemble. We're working hard to update the site with information about the latest release.
In the meantime, you might find the WIP docs useful. The unit tests are also great examples!
Is the assemble website up-to-date?
No, as mentioned above, it's completely out-of-date. If you're using grunt-assemble, some of the documentation at assemble.io might still be useful. If you're using assemble v0.6.0 and higher, the documentation is probably wrong in almost every way.
We're actively (daily) working on a refactor and it's a very high priority.
What's the difference between assemble-core and assemble?
Assemble adds a CLI, a few built-in view collections: pages
, layouts
, and partials
, middleware for parsing front-matter, and a few other basic defaults that we've found many users expect. If you'd prefer different defaults, assemble-core is a great starting point.
If you want something that handles templates, rendering, engines, helpers, collections, etc. but you don't need to run tasks or work with the file system, then consider using templates instead of assemble-core.
I use gulp, why is it recommended to use assemble directly, instead of running assemble with gulp?
You can run gulp plugins with assemble, but it won't always work the other way around. This is because, as a build system, assemble does things that gulp doesn't do, like handle middleware.
For example, assemble's .src
and .dest
methods have built-in .onStream
, .preWrite
, and .postWrite
middleware handlers. If you still wish to use gulp and your build cycle includes middleware that requires these handlers, you can use the assemble-handle plugin with gulp to ensure that the handlers are still called as needed.
This is a long way of saying, you can find ways to make gulp work, but you would just be adding an extra dependency to your project to do things that assemble already does.
What is the relationship between gulp and assemble?
Please read our gulp FAQ for more information.
About
Community
Get updates on Assemble's development and chat with the project maintainers and community members.
Follow @assemblejs on Twitter.
If you like Assemble and want to tweet about it, please feel free to mention
@assemblejs
or use the#assemble
hashtagRead and subscribe to The Official Assemble Blog.
- Join the official Slack room.
Join the conversation on Gitter
Tell us about your assemble project
- Show your love by starring Assemble!
- Get implementation help on StackOverflow (please use the assemble
assemble
tag in questions) Gitter Discuss Assemble with us on Gitter
For maximum discoverability, plugin developers should use the keyword
assembleplugin
on packages which modify or add to the functionality of Assemble when distributing through npm or similar delivery mechanisms.
Contributing
Please read our contributing guide if you'd like to learn more about contributing to this project.
Related projects
You might also be interested in these projects from @doowb and @jonschlinkert:
- boilerplate: Tools and conventions for authoring and using declarative configurations for project "boilerplates" that can be… more | homepage
- generate: Command line tool and developer framework for scaffolding out new GitHub projects. Generate offers the… more | homepage
- scaffold: Conventions and API for creating declarative configuration objects for project scaffolds - similar in format… more | homepage
- update: Be scalable! Update is a new, open source developer framework and CLI for automating updates… more | homepage
- verb: Documentation generator for GitHub projects. Verb is extremely powerful, easy to use, and is used… more | homepage
Similar projects
If assemble doesn't do what you need, there are some other great open source projects you might be interested in, created by our friends on GitHub (in alphabetical order):
Static site generators
Blog frameworks
Release history
Changelog entries are classified using the following labels (from keep-a-changelog):
added
: for new featureschanged
: for changes in existing functionalitydeprecated
: for once-stable features removed in upcoming releasesremoved
: for deprecated features removed in this releasefixed
: for any bug fixes
Custom labels used in this changelog:
dependencies
: bumps dependencieshousekeeping
: code re-organization, minor edits, or other changes that don't fit in one of the other categories.
0.24.0 - 2017-05-19
added
- By popular request, assemble now automatically expands config templates in yaml front-matter, via expand-front-matter! This is a feature that we had in grunt-assemble, and users let us know that they wanted it back.
fixed
- Updated dependencies to use is-binary-buffer, which fixes a bug where
isbinaryfile
was trying to read from a file that didn't exist.
0.23.0 - 2017-02-11
dependencies
- Bumps assemble-core to get an update to assemble-streams that ensures that
view
is decorated with.toStream()
when created byapp
(versus a collection).
0.21.0 - 2017-02-03
dependencies
- Bumps assemble-loader to v1.0.0 to take advantage of optimizations, improvements and bug fixes related to loading views
fixed
- Regression in 0.20.0 that was causing
view.stat
to be null in some cases afterview.path
changed view.base
was not always correct on views that were not created from the file system
0.20.0 - 2017-02-02
dependencies
- Bumps assemble-core to v0.29.0 to take advantage of improvements to
dest
handling
0.19.0 - 2017-02-01
dependencies
- Bumps assemble-core to v0.28.0 to take advantage of new methods available on
list
s
0.18.0
Dependencies
- bumps assemble-core to 0.27.0
0.17.0
Dependencies
- bumps assemble-core to 0.26.0
0.16.1
- bump dependencies. In particular, there was a bug in parser-front-matter where leading whitespace was removed after extracting front-matter, which caused the first line of indentation to be removed. This has been fixed.
0.16.0
- Added:
.log()
method, which also exposes additional methods, like.log.info()
,.log.success()
, etc. - docs were moved to
support/docs
, so that markdown docs can be built to thedocs
directory - docs were updated, new docs added
- Moves some private prototype methods to static methods, to allow them to be used without creating an instance
- Bumps assemble-core to v0.25.0
0.15.0
- Bumps assemble-core to v0.24.0 to get the latest versions of templates and base-data which removes the
renameKey
option from the.data
method. Use thenamespace
option instead.
0.14.0
Bumps assemble-core to v0.22.0 to take advantage of fixes and improvements to lookup methods: .find
and getView
. No API changes were made. Please let us know if regressions occur.
- fixes
List
bug that was caused collection helpers to explode - Improvements to lookup functions:
app.getView()
andapp.find()
- Bumps base to take advantages of code optimizations.
0.13.0
- Bumps assemble-core to v0.21.0. Support for the
queue
property was removed on collections. See assemble-core for additional details. - Fixes bug where glob parent was not being used for
file.base
, causing dest directory to be relative to cwd instead of glob parent in some cases. - Some changes were made to context handling that effected one unit test out of ~1,000. although it's unlikely you'll be effected by the change, it warrants a minor bump
- Externalizes common templates tests to base-test-runner, so that assemble plugins and other base applications can use the tests
- Includes a fix from assemble-loader, where a bug caused
renameKey
to not always be used when defined on collection loader options. - Includes fixes from templates for resolving layouts
0.12.0
- Bumps assemble-core to v0.18.0, which includes a bump in templates. See the changelog on the templates library for more details.
0.11.0
debug
methods and related code have been removed- Bumps assemble-core to v0.17.0
0.10.0
- Adds support for using es6 generators with tasks
- Bumps assemble-core to v0.15.0
0.9.0
- Bumps several dependencies. No API changes, this is mostly an optimization release. Be sure to completely remove
node_modules
and reinstall all dependencies to avoid errors such asisRegistered is not a function
0.8.0
- Updates composer to v0.11.0, which removes the
.watch
method in favor of using the base-watch plugin. - Changes in templates. Please see v0.11.0 in templates history for more details.
0.7.0
- Stability improvements and optimizations of the API introduced in v0.6.0.
0.6.0
- Major refactor. Assemble was completely re-written from the ground-up as a standalone node.js library and is no longer a grunt plugin. Grunt plugin support has been moved to grunt-assemble. Please see that repo for additional details.
(Changelog generated by helper-changelog)
Contributing
Pull requests and stars are always welcome. For bugs and feature requests, please create an issue.
Please read the contributing guide for advice on opening issues, pull requests, and coding standards.
If Assemble doesn't do what you need, please let us know
Contributors
Authors
Jon Schlinkert
Brian Woodward
License
Copyright © 2017, Jon Schlinkert. MIT
This file was generated by verb-generate-readme, v0.6.0, on May 19, 2017.
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
8 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
9 years ago
10 years ago
10 years ago
10 years ago
10 years ago
10 years ago
10 years ago
10 years ago
10 years ago
10 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
11 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago
12 years ago