metalsmith-incremental

Faster incremental builds for MetalSmith

Install

npm i metalsmith-incremental

Usage

1. Find out which is the slow part of your build. Hint: Go and checkout metalsmith-timer This will give you insights in your concrete bottleneck.

2. Wrap your plugin middleware with metalsmith-incremental, like:

import metalsmith from 'metalsmith'
// import any plugins here
// ...
import incremental from 'metalsmith-incremental'

// filter unmodified files
metalsmith.use(incremental({ plugin: 'filter' }))
// run slow plugins
metalsmith.use(slowPlugin())
// restore unmodified files
metalsmith.use(incremental({ plugin: 'cache' }))

// optionally enable watching
if(process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development') {
  metalsmith.use(incremental({ plugin: 'watch' }))
}

// in case you have restored all files with cache plugin
// call filter plugin as last middleware
metalsmith.use(incremental({ plugin: 'filter' }))

// build metalsmith
metalsmith.build((err) => {
  if (err) throw err
})

3. In case your plugin wraps content which could include other content (dependencies), you can specify custom RegExp or Function, which should extract those depended files and occasionally rebuild them too (.jade and .pug is supported by default).

// dependencies with RegEx
metalsmith.use(incremental({
  depResolver: /^import ["'](.*)['"]$/mg
}))
metalsmith.use(slowPlugin())

Important: Your RegEx has to define one capturing group (which holds the dependency path data), match global and multiline.

// dependencies with Function
metalsmith.use(incremental({
  depResolver: (file, baseDir) => {
    const dependencies = []
    // do your custom magic to find dependencies
    return dependencies
  }
}))
metalsmith.use(slowPlugin())

Note: You can also pass a hash of RegEx or Function by file extension.

4. Don't forget to enable file watching (if your are in dev mode)

// optionally enable watching
if(process.env.NODE_ENV === 'development') {
  metalsmith.use(incremental({ plugin: 'watch' }))
}

5. Make sure to write only modified files to disk, by calling filter at the last middleware

metalsmith.use(incremental({ plugin: 'filter' }))

Important: This plugin is designed to be used only with MetalSmith plugins who operate on file basis. Other plugins who depend on metadata, etc may break.

Edge Cases

Special circumstances like dependencies, plugins renaming, deleting, adding files should be considered carefully.

Dependencies

Let's consider you are using a template engine like PugJS and you are changing a partial, mixin or extended layout. This means each file which includes those dependencies needs to be rebuild too, even if they did not change itself.

To solve these you have basically two methods to chose from:

• Dependency Resolver config for filter plugin
• Paths Map config for watch plugin

Note

The Paths-Map makes especially sense if you remove some files by metalsmith-branch or metalsmith-ignore temporarily from the pipeline (which makes them unavailable for dependency resolver) but still want to trigger updates on other files if one of those ignored files has changed.

Dynamic Dependencies

If you dynamically include dependencies then your best bet is again Paths-Map config, or your write your own very clever dependency resolver function.

Renaming

If you are using any plugin like metalsmith-markdown or any template engine like PugJS it's very likely that the original file extension changes from .md or .pug to .html.

To solve these just let the cache plugin know those renaming rules:

• Rename Object config for cache plugin
• Rename Function config for cache plugin

Circular Dependencies and metadata

We recommend to always build metadata from scratch. But if you really have an intensive metadata plugin. You can force updates of file's metadata (not global metadata):

• Props List config for cache plugin

Trouble with metalsmith-collections?

Check metalsmith/collections#27

API

Check our API documentation.

Inspiration

After we had very long metalsmith builds during development, it was time to seek for change. We have found this inspiring blog post http://www.mograblog.com/2016/11/speed-up-metalsmith.html. Though it was far from complete, not mentioning circular references, dependencies, metadata and more very specific stuff, we decided to take the next step.