npm_assets

A little gem to add your npm modules to the Rails asset pipeline

Why?

The rails asset pipeline is excellent at packaging and serving javascript (and coffeescript). But you still have to get these libraries into your app somehow. NPM is the standard in the javascript world for distributing and packaging libraries (think rubygems). How bout we just use that, rather than have to go make asset gems for each javascript library we want to use?

Prerequisites

You'll need npm and node installed for this all to work.

How?

In your app, to actually bring in the codez, we've added a new directive to indicate which npms your application requires. Use it just like reuiqre

#= require_npm underscore
#= require_npm backbone

Next, to actually grab those npms, we have rake task which creates or modifies a package.json file and does an "npm install":

$ rake npm_assets:install

This will grab the dependencies and pop em in a node_modules directory. This gem will then come along and add the appropriate directories from within each module to the asset path.

Why not?

This gem really doesn't deal with the issue of namespacing, so it may not work with some npms. In the future, I'd like to add a separate directive (npm_require maybe?) to bring in npms and assign them to a namespace, but for now this gem will only help you with npm libraries than know how to deal with being in the browser (eg don't use exports if it's not present). Also, it you still have to add a require directive for each file, it won't grab dependencies for you (yet).

For an alternative solution, see nodeify. If you're down with having all your javascript code follow commonjs module semantics, it seems like a good bet.