The h5bp ant build script

The build script is a tool that optimizes your code for production use on the web.

Why use it?

Faster page load times and happy end users :)

What it does

• Combines and minifies javascript (via yui compressor)
• Inlines stylesheets specified using @import in your CSS
• Combines and minifies CSS
• Optimizes JPGs and PNGs (with jpegtran & optipng)
• Removes development only code (any remaining console.log files, profiling, test suite)
• Basic to aggressive html minification (via htmlcompressor)
• Autogenerates a cache manifest file (and links from the html tag) when you enable a property in the project config file.
• Revises the file names of your assets so that you can use heavy caching (1 year expires).
• Upgrades the .htaccess to use heavier caching
• Updates your HTML to reference these new hyper-optimized CSS + JS files
• Updates your HTML to use the minified jQuery instead of the development version
• Remove unneeded references from HTML (like a root folder favicon)
• Runs your JavaScript through a code quality tool (optional)
• Optionally precompile LESS formatted CSS
• Optionally output JSDOC3 documentation

Add the build script to your project

Since we split out the build scripts from the main h5bp repo, you now have more options on how to integrate a build script into your project. Beyond the choice of technology, there's also the choice of how to integrate the build script of choice into your h5bp project or local repo. There is nothing stopping you from manually dropping the build script in to your HTML5 Boilerplate project. That works.

However, if you'd like to merge it into your main repository and preserve the build script commit history, please follow this workflow:

# Move into your project's git repository
cd my-project
# Create and checkout a new feature branch
git checkout -b ant-build-script
# Create a new remote called "h5bp-ant-bs".
# Fetch the build script from the remote repository.
git remote add -f h5bp-ant-bs git://github.com/h5bp/ant-build-script.git
git merge -s ours --no-commit h5bp-ant-bs/master
# Put the build script into a subdirectory `build/`
git read-tree --prefix=build/ -u h5bp-ant-bs/master
# Commit the merge (preserve the build script history too)
git commit -m "Subtree merge H5BP ant build script"
# Update the build script subtree if needed
git pull -s subtree h5bp-ant-bs master
# Merge back into master branch if everything went according to plan

Requirements

Out of the box, the build script requires Java 1.6.

Ant itself requires the Java JDK, version 1.4 or later. 1.5 or later is strongly recommended.

Closure Compiler, our tool for script minification, requires Java 1.6.

This means that OS X versions prior to 10.6 are no longer supported out of the box. SoyLatte provides 10.4 and 10.5 builds of OpenJDK 7 for Intel OS X machines. However, only OS X 10.5 builds of OpenJDK 7 are available for PowerPC based Macs due to a bug in the 10.4 Compiler. ( Be sure to read the Download link as the archives are password protected "to provide a click though agreement" of the JDK licensing. )

Alternatively, YUI Compressor, which requires Java > 1.4, could be swapped out for Closure Compiler.

Quick Start

You must wrap any scripts to concatenate in a pair of specially constructed comments. These look like this:

    <!-- scripts concatenated and minified via build script -->
    <script src="js/plugins.js"></script>
    <script src="js/main.js"></script>
    <!-- end scripts -->

If you're on Mac or Linux...

You've got all your dependencies pre-installed, likely. You need to install ant-contrib to get the build script working.

On Linux use yum install ant-contrib.

On Mac, install MacPorts and then do sudo port install ant-contrib.

If you're on Windows...

• Get the [[Java JDK|http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/downloads/index.html]] (JRE isn't enough).
• Get [[WinAnt|http://code.google.com/p/winant/]] and point the installer to Program Files/Java/jre6/bin/
• For detailed information on installing Ant for Windows, see this [[step-by-step instruction by Nicholas Zakas|http://www.nczonline.net/blog/2012/04/12/how-to-install-apache-ant-on-windows/]].

Using the Build Script

• 1. Mac users, open the application "Terminal". Windows users, open command line interface by doing Start Menu > Run > cmd.exe. However, Windows users, we created a friendly runbuildscript.bat file for you if you'd like to avoid the command line and navigate to the build directory within your project.

For those of you new to terminal or command line, use the change directory command followed by the directory path. for example...

cd sites/your-site/build/

Note: To ensure you've navigated to the correct directory, you may want to now check the files within the current directory. Mac users can type "ls" in terminal. Windows users should type "dir" in command line. If the file list returned is what you were expecting, move to step 2. Otherwise, check the directory location in Finder or Windows Explorer and start over.

• 2. Next, simply type:

  ant build

The H5BP build script will begin to run and compress your files. At the very end you should see "BUILD SUCCESSFUL" followed by the total time it took to build.

• 3. Now, look in your H5BP project folder and see that there is a newly created "publish" directory within your project. Inside, you will find your minified CSS, JS and along with duplicates of the files from your original directory. This new set of files within "publish" is your production code. The site should look and function the same in browser as it did before, but only now faster!

Note: If your new pages do not render in browser the same as they did before your ran the build script, visit the Troubleshooting section below.

Going Further

There are a few different build options:

ant build     # minor html optimizations (extra quotes removed). inline script/style minified (default)
ant buildkit  # all html whitespace retained. inline script/style minified 
ant basics    # same as build minus the basic html minfication
ant minify    # same as build plus full html minification
ant text      # same as build but without image (png/jpg) optimizing

Your build will be added to the publish/ folder. BOOM! you're done.