Frontend: External Assets

Pakyow provides a simple way to manage external JavaScript in your apps, without the bloat of a tool like NPM or Yarn. These tools can be great for complex build pipelines, but Pakyow's simpler approach is a good fit for most applications.

External scripts are defined in your application's configure block:

config/application.rb

Pakyow.app do
  configure do
    external_script :d3
  end
end

The next time the project is started in development mode, Pakyow will fetch a browser-ready build of the D3.js library, placing it into the frontend/packs/vendor folder. D3 can be loaded like any other pack:

---
packs:
- d3
---

...

Any package hosted on NPM can be managed in this way, as long as it provides a browser-ready build for distribution. Pakyow currently fetches external scripts from the unpkg.com service.

Working with package version

When an external package version is left unspecified, as in the previous example, Pakyow will download the latest available version. To specify a specific version, simply define it when registering the external package:

config/application.rb

Pakyow.app do
  configure do
    external_script :d3, "5.5.0"
  end
end

The version can be any semvar value supported by NPM. Read more →

Specifying the package name

Sometimes the name of the external package is not the most logical name to use within your application. For example, the Pakyow.js pack lives in a package named @pakyow/js but is exposed through the pakyow pack.

Pakyow can handle these cases with the package argument:

config/application.rb

Pakyow.app do
  configure do
    external_script :pakyow, package: "@pakyow/js"
  end
end

Here the given name pakyow is used to name the pack available within the application, while @pakyow/js is the name of the external package to be fetched from NPM.

Updating external assets

Use the pakyow assets:update command to update external assets:

pakyow assets:update