runisland:static-assets

Automatically load static assets (fonts, images…) from dependencies (like node_modules or any directory) into your Meteor project, as if you had copied them manually into your public folder.

Derived from mys:fonts package.

Quick Guide

1. Add this package to your Meteor project: meteor add runisland:static-assets

2. Create a static-assets.json file at the root of your Meteor project.

3. List your static assets in the "map" hash map, following the convention:

"true/path/from/project/root/to/file.png": "target/path/in/public/folder/to/file.png"

For example:

1{
2    "map": {
3        "node_modules/ionic-angular/fonts/": "fonts/"
4    }
5}

As you can notice, by default this package can scan all files in the specified folder (but not recursively, i.e. it does not work if files are in sub-folders of the specified path).

Configuration

Option	Type	Default	Description
map	Object<String>	{}	List of files and/or folders to load as static assets. Filtered by extensions. Not recursive for folders.
extensions	Array<String>	["ttf", "woff", "png"]	List of extensions to be considered. Any file in "map" with non-matching extension will be ignored.
scanFolders	boolean	true	Enable scanning files in folders specified in "map" (must contain the trailing slash /). The file name is kept intact and is appended to the target path (which must also include the trailing slash /). Not recursive (i.e. does not scan files in sub-folders of the specified path).
verbose	boolean	false	Display loaded static assets in compiler console.

What about stylesheets?

For stylesheets, you can import them using import "module-name/path/to/stylesheet.css"; simple statement, provided that you have the ecmascript package in your Meteor project. Meteor will automatically convert it into a dynamic stylesheet link.

Reference: https://guide.meteor.com/v1.3/using-npm-packages.html#npm-styles

You can also create a symlink or directly copy the file into your client folder, so that it is compiled, bundled and minified with the rest of the stylesheets.

As for relative links to static assets, remember that Meteor will serve the stylesheet at the app root level (even when dynamically linked), and remove any parent path (../). Therefore, the target path that you specify in static-assets.json must match the original relative link, without any parent level path (i.e. remove any ../).

What about scripts?

As of Meteor 1.3, you can directly use import { member } from "module-name"; statement to use a script from an npm dependency.

Reference: https://guide.meteor.com/v1.3/using-npm-packages.html#using-npm

Rationale

Why not directly using Atmosphere packages?

Sometimes there is no wrapper in Atmosphere for your favorite library or they might not be up-to-date with their npm source (or whatever source).

This is even more true since Meteor 1.3, because we can now directly use npm modules. Unfortunately, Meteor does not provide yet an out-of-the-box solution for static assets which might be shipped with those modules.

Difference with mys:fonts package

This package also matches files that are specified through their immediately containing parent folder, whereas with mys:fonts you need to list each file individually.

Why not copying files with gulp, Jake, whatever?

Of course, you can use your method of choice to perform this task.

It could even be more efficient, since you would copy your static assets only once to your public folder (or whenever your dependencies are updated), whereas this Meteor package scans all files in your project and re-runs at every build (because it is actually registered as a compiler build plugin).

The main advantage of this Meteor package is that it is a very simple tool to perform the task directly with Meteor build system, instead of having to pick, possibly learn and setup another one.

Limitations

Because this package is actually a Meteor compiler build plugin, it has to share file extensions with other compilers (hence the requirement to explicitly specify file extensions in the first place).

Since you can have only 1 compiler per file extension, you should not try to use this package to handle js and css extensions, and their derivatives if applicable (jsx, ts, coffee, scss, etc.).

License

runisland:static-assets is distributed under the MIT License (Expat type), like mys:fonts and Meteor.