Copying assets intelligently

If you don't want to use nanoc's asset-compiling functionality because you only need to copy them and not filter them, you can use rsync to copy assets instead.

Using rsync

rsync is useful because it makes sure assets are only copied when they’re not copied already, for instance. It can also prevent subversion directories from being copied. To use rsync, create a Rake task which does something along these lines:

task :compile do
  system "rsync -rpgvP --exclude='.svn' assets/ output"
  system "nanoc co"
end

You may want to play with the options, but the default set of options (the one used above) is probably good enough.

If you want, you can make the compile task from above be the default task, so you can simply type rake, which is even shorter than nanoc co (or nanoc compile), like this:

task :default => :compile

Using Ruby

Another way to do it is the following quick 'n dirty hack in Ruby code:

%w{yaml}.each{|lib| require lib}
# a rake task to copy any css and javascript 
# files over to the webroot output directory

config  = YAML.load(File.open("config.yaml"))

def path_tree(path,to_copy=[])
  tree = []
  Dir.glob("#{path}/*").each do |path|
    if File.directory?(path)
      tree << path_tree(path)
    else
      tree << path 
      path_tree(path)
    end 
  end 
  tree.flatten
end

task :default do
  config["asset_dirs"].each do |search_dir| 
    path_tree(search_dir).each do |asset|
      # Some vars
      from  = asset
      to    = [config["output_dir"],asset].join("/")
      # Create dir for file, if necessary; 
      # e.g., for /path/to/file.txt
      # create /path/to, if need be
      if !File.exist?(File.dirname(to))
        puts "mkdir -p #{File.dirname(to)}"
        File.makedirs(File.dirname(to))
      end 
      # Copy the file over, but only if it's changed or doesn't already exist
      if !File.exist?(to) || !File.compare(from,to)
        puts "cp #{from} #{to}"
        File.copy(from,to)
      end 
    end 
  end 
end

Put something like this in your config.yaml:

asset_dirs: ["css", "js"]

Where each member of the array is a subdir of the nanoc root directory that you want copied over.