Optimus

A Ring middleware for frontend performance optimization.

It serves your static assets:

in production: as optimized bundles
in development: as unchanged, individual files

In other words: Develop with ease. Optimize in production.

Features

Depending on how you use it, Optimus:

concatenates your JavaScript and CSS files into bundles.
adds cache-busters to your static asset URLs
adds far future Expires headers
minifies your JavaScript with UglifyJS 2
minifies your CSS with clean-css
inlines CSS imports while preserving media queries

Install

Add [optimus "0.19.1"] to :dependencies in your project.clj.

Please note that this project uses Semantic Versioning. As long as we're on a 0 major version, there will likely be API changes. Pay attention when upgrading to a new minor version. Read the change log. As soon as we're on a 1 major version, there will be no breaking changes without a major version increase.

There were breaking changes in 0.16, 0.17 and 0.19. If you're upgrading, you might want to read more about them.

Why isn't Optimus 1.0 yet?

We're using clj-v8 to run JavaScript, which doesn't work on Windows or CentOS/RHEL 5. The plan is to replace clj-v8 with Nashorn, and then release 1.0.

Usage

Let's look at an example:

(ns my-app.example
  (:require [optimus.prime :as optimus]
            [optimus.assets :as assets] ;; 1
            [optimus.optimizations :as optimizations] ;; 2
            [optimus.strategies :as strategies])) ;; 3

(defn get-assets [] ;; 4
  (concat ;; 5
   (assets/load-bundle "public" ;; 6
                       "styles.css" ;; 7
                       ["/styles/reset.css" ;; 8
                        "/styles/main.css"]) ;; 9
   (assets/load-bundles "public" ;; 10
                        {"lib.js" ["/scripts/ext/angular.js"
                                   #"/scripts/ext/.+\.js$"] ;; 11
                         "app.js" ["/scripts/controllers.js"
                                   "/scripts/directives.js"]})
   (assets/load-assets "public" ;; 12
                       ["/images/logo.png"
                        "/images/photo.jpg"])
   [{:path "/init.js" ;; 13
     :contents (str "var contextPath = " (:context-path env))
     :bundle "app.js"}]))

(-> app
    (optimus/wrap ;; 14
     get-assets ;; 15
     (if (= :dev (:env config)) ;; 16
       optimizations/none ;; 17
       optimizations/all) ;; 18
     (if (= :dev (:env config)) ;; 19
       strategies/serve-live-assets ;; 20
       strategies/serve-frozen-assets)) ;; 21
    (ring.middleware.content-type/wrap-content-type) ;; 22
    (ring.middleware.not-modified/wrap-not-modified)) ;; 23

Assets are scripts, stylesheets, images, fonts and other static resources your webapp uses.
You can mix and match optimizations.
You can choose different strategies for how you want to serve your assets.
Declare how to get your assets in a function.
It returns a list of assets.
The helpers in optimus.assets load files from a given directory on the classpath (normally in the resources directory). So in this case, the files are loaded from resources/public/.
The name of this bundle is styles.css.
It takes a list of paths. These paths double as URLs to the assets, and paths to the files in the public directory.
The contents are concatenated together in the order specified in the bundle.
You can declare several bundles at once with load-bundles.
You can use regexen to find multiple files without specifying each individually. Make sure you're specific enough to avoid including weird things out of other jars on the class path.

Notice that angular.js is included first, even tho it is included by the regex. This way you can make sure dependencies are loaded before their dependents.
You can add individual assets that aren't part of a bundle, but should be optimized and served through Optimus. This is useful to add cache busters and far future Expires headers to images served straight from your HTML.

If you use the optimus.assets helpers, you don't have to list images and fonts referenced in your CSS files - those are added along with the stylesheet.
Assets don't have to be files on disk. This example creates an asset on the path /init.js that is bundled along with the app.js bundle.
Add optimus/wrap as a Ring middleware.
Pass in the function that loads all your assets.
Pass in the function that optimizes your assets. You can choose from those in optimus.optimizations, or write your own asset transformation functions.
optimizations/none does nothing and returns your assets unharmed.
When you use optimizations/all you get everything that Optimus provides. But you can easily exchange this for a function that executes only the transformations that you need.
Pass in your chosen strategy. Set up properly with environment variables of some kind.
In development you want the assets to be served live. No need to restart the app just to see changes or new files.
In production you want the assets to be frozen. They're loaded and optimized when the application starts.

Take note: You're free to serve optimized, live assets. It'll be a little slow, but what if your javascript doesn't minify well? How do you reproduce it? It's damn annoying having to restart the server for each change. Here's a way that optimizes just like production, but still serves fresh changes without restarts.
Since Ring comes with content type middleware, Optimus doesn't worry about it. Just make sure to put it after Optimus.
The same goes for responding with 304 Not Modified. Since Optimus adds Last-Modified headers, Ring handles the rest.

Using the new URLs

Since we're rewriting URLs to include cache busters, we need to access them through Optimus.

Notice that we use map, since there is likely more than one URL in development mode.

(ns my-app.view
  (:require [optimus.link :as link]))

(defn my-page
  [request]
  (hiccup.core/html
   [:html
    [:head
     (map (fn [url] [:link {:rel "stylesheet" :href url}])
          (link/bundle-paths request ["styles.css"]))]
    [:body
     (map (fn [url] [:script {:src url}])
          (link/bundle-paths request ["lib.js" "app.js"]))]]))

There's even some sugar available:

(defn my-page
  [request]
  (hiccup.core/html
   [:html
    [:head
     (optimus.html/link-to-css-bundles request ["styles.css"])]
    [:body
     (optimus.html/link-to-js-bundles request ["lib.js" "app.js"])]]))

These link-to-*-bundles will return a string of HTML that includes several script/link tags in development, and a single tag in production.

Specifying the optimizations

If you want to mix and match optimizations, here's how you do that:

(defn my-optimize [assets options]
  (-> assets
      (optimizations/minify-js-assets options)
      (optimizations/minify-css-assets options)
      (optimizations/inline-css-imports)
      (optimizations/concatenate-bundles)
      (optimizations/add-cache-busted-expires-headers)
      (optimizations/add-last-modified-headers)))

(-> app
    (optimus/wrap
     get-assets
     (if (= :dev (:env config))
       optimizations/none
       my-optimize)
     the-strategy))

Just remember that you should always add cache busters after concatenating bundles.

Adding your own asset transformation functions is fair game too. In fact, it's encouraged. Let's say you need to serve all assets from a Content Delivery Network ...

Yeah, we are using a Content Delivery Network. How does that work?

To serve the files from a different host, add a :base-url to the assets:

(defn add-cdn-base-url-to-assets [assets]
  (map #(assoc % :base-url "http://cdn.example.com") assets))

(defn my-optimize [assets options]
  (-> assets
      (optimizations/all options)
      (add-cdn-base-url-to-assets)))

This supposes that your CDN will pull assets from your app server on cache misses. If you need to push files to the CDN, you also need to save them to disk. Like this:

(defn export-assets []
  (-> (get-assets)
      (my-optimize (get-optimisation-options))
      (optimus.export/save-assets "./cdn-export/")))

You can even add an alias to your project.clj:

:aliases {"export-assets" ["run" "-m" "my-app.example/export-assets"]}

And run lein export-assets from the command line. Handy.

Those are a whole lot of files being exported.

Yeah, two reasons for that:

Optimus supports linking to individual assets even after they're bundled. If you don't want that, remove the :bundled assets.
Optimus supports linking to assets by their original URL. If there are no external apps that need to link to your assets, remove the :outdated assets.

Like this:

(defn export-assets []
  (as-> (get-assets) assets
        (optimizations/all assets options)
        (remove :bundled assets)
        (remove :outdated assets)
        (optimus.export/save-assets assets "./cdn-export/")))

So how does all this work in development mode?

The paths are used unchanged. So given this example:

(-> app
    (optimus/wrap
     #(assets/load-bundle "public" "app.js"
                          ["/app/some.js"
                           "/app/cool.js"
                           "/app/code.js"])
     optimizations/none
     strategies/serve-live-assets))

When you call

(optimus.link/bundle-paths request ["app.js"])

it returns

["/app/some.js"
 "/app/cool.js"
 "/app/code.js"]

And those are served from resources/public/, or more specifically on eg. public/app/some.js on the classpath.

What about production mode?

When you use the serve-frozen-assets strategy, all the contents for each bundle is read at startup. And with optimizations/all, the URLs are generated from the hash of the contents and the identifier of the bundle.

So when you call (link/bundle-paths request ["app.js"]), it now returns:

["/bundles/d131dd02c5e6/app.js"]

and the middleware handles this URL by returning the concatenated file contents in the order given by the bundle.

What if the contents have changed?

All the contents are read at startup, and then never checked again. To read in new contents, the app has to be restarted.

No, I mean, what if someone requests an old version of app.js?

With a different hash? Yeah, then they get a 404. In production, you should serve the files through Nginx or Varnish to avoid this problem while doing rolling restarts of app servers.

Why not just ignore the hash and return the current contents?

Because then the user might be visiting an old app server with a new URL, and suddenly she is caching stale contents. Or worse, your Nginx or Varnish cache picks up on it and is now serving out old shit in a new wrapping. Not cool.

This of course depends on how your machines are set up, and how you do your rolling restarts, but it's a source of bugs that are hard to track down.

What if I need to share static files with someone else?

Well, they have no way of knowing the cache buster hash, of course. Luckily the files are still available on their original URLs.

When you're serving optimized assets, the bundles are also available. For instance: /bundles/d131dd02c5e6/app.js can also be accessed on /bundles/app.js.

Please note: You have to make extra sure these URLs are not served with far future expires headers, or you'll be in trouble when updating.

How do I handle cache busters on images?

CSS files that reference images are rewritten so that they point to cache busting URLs.

If you're using static images in your HTML, then you'll add a list of these files with optimus.assets/load-assets like point 11 in the big example.

And then grab the cache buster URL like so:

(link/file-path request "/images/logo.png")

You can also add a fallback image, if the given one doesn't exists.

(link/file-path request (str "/images/members/" (:id member) ".png")
                :fallback "/images/anonymous.png")

Sam Ritchie has written this HTML transformation using Enlive that rewrites all your image tags with no extra work. That is pretty cool!

Can I tweak how Optimus behaves?

There are some options to be tuned, but if you're planning on doing major things there's nothing wrong with writing your own strategies or optimizations. A pull request is welcome too.

Now, for the options. You pass them to the wrapper after the strategy:

(-> app
    (optimus/wrap
     get-assets optimize the-strategy
     {:cache-live-assets 2000
      :uglify-js {:mangle-names true}
      :clean-css {:aggressive-merging true
                  :advanced-optimizations true
                  :keep-line-breaks false
                  :keep-special-comments "*"
                  :compatibility "*"}}))

Values in this example are all defaults, so it's just a verbose noop.

:cache-live-assets - Assets can be costly to fetch, especially if you're looking up lots of different regexen on the class path. Considering that this has to be done for every request in development mode, it can take its toll on the load times.

Tune this parameter to change for how many milliseconds the live assets should be frozen. false disables the caching.

`:uglify-js`

:mangle-names - When minifying JavaScript, local variable names are changed to be just one letter. This reduces file size, but disrupts some libraries that use clever reflection tricks - like Angular.JS. Set to false to keep local variable names intact.

`:clean-css`

:aggressive-merging - set to false to disable aggressive merging of properties.
:advanced-optimizations - set to false to disable advanced optimizations; selector & property merging, reduction, etc.
:keep-line-breaks - set to true to keep line breaks.
:keep-special-comments - "*" for keeping all (default), 1 for keeping first one only, 0 for removing all
:compatibility - enables compatibility mode, see clean-css docs for examples

Automatic compilation when assets source files change

Sometimes in development mode serving live assets may be too slow even with caching (for example if you're looking up lots of regexen on the class path). In this case you can use serve-live-assets-autorefresh strategy. This strategy will watch for changes in assets source files and recompile assets in the background whenever it's needed. Compiled assets are then cached until the next change in the source files. By default it assumes that assets sources are located in resources directory, but it can be customized with :assets-dir config option.

(-> app
    (optimus/wrap
     get-assets optimize serve-live-assets-autorefresh
     {:assets-dir "resources/public"}))

What are these assets anyway? They seem magical to me.

Luckily they're just data. The most basic operation of Optimus is serving assets from a list, with this minimal structure:

[{:path :contents}]

It serves the :contents if the request :uri matches :path.

In addition to :path and :contents, the asset map may contain:

:bundle - the name of the bundle this asset is part of.
:headers - headers to be served along with the asset.
:original-path - the path before any changes was made, like cache-busters.
:outdated - the asset won't be linked to, but is available when referenced directly.
:base-url - prepended to the path when linking.
:last-modified - when the asset was last modified, in milliseconds since epoch.

There's also the case that some assets may be binary. Some of them might be large. Instead of keeping those :contents in memory, they have a :resource instead, which is a URL to be served as a stream.

Built on top of that is a bunch of operations that either help you:

Load assets to put in the list: optimus.assets
Optimize the assets in the list somehow: optimus.optimizations
Decide how you want to serve the assets: optimus.strategies
Link to the assets: optimus.link

If you want to know more, the tests are a good place to start reading. They go in to all the details of how Optimus works and even has some commentary on reasoning and reasons.

Are there any working examples to look at?

Take a look at these:

The emacsrocks.com and parens-of-the-dead.com websites both use Optimus to optimize their assets. Source here and here.
August Lilleaas wrote a blog about using React on the server with JDK8. In the example code, he uses Optimus for frontend optimization.
The sinonjs.org site is a static website written with Stasis, and it too uses Optimus for frontend optimization. Here's the sinon-docs repo.

Are you using Optimus in an open-source project? Please do let me know, and I'll add it to the list.

Why not split Optimus into a bunch of middlewares?

I set out to create a suite of middlewares for frontend optimization. The first was Catenate, which concerned itself with concatenation into bundles. So I certainly agree with your point. You'd be hard pressed to think otherwise in the Clojure community, I think, with its focus on "decomplecting". The reason I gave up on that idea is two-fold:

Assets aren't first class in the Ring middleware stack.
The different optimizations are not orthogonal.

I'll try to elaborate.

First class assets

Let's look at two examples:

When you bundle files together, your HTML has to reference either the bundle URL (in prod) or all the individual files (in dev). There has to be some sort of lookup from the bundle ID to a list of URLs, and this is dependent on your asset-serving strategy.
When you add cache-busters to URLs, you need some sort of lookup from the original URL to the cache-busted URL, so you can link to them with a known name.

In other words, both the bundle middleware and the cache-busting middleware either needs to own the list of assets, or it needs to rest on a first class asset concept in the stack.

Now add the ability to serve WebP images to browsers that support it. Not only do you have to change the image URLs, but you also have to serve a different set of CSS to use these new images. So this middleware would have to know which CSS files reference which files, and rewrite them.

All of these could be fixed with a well-thought out Asset concept in the Ring middleware stack. Which is what Optimus is an attempt at. It adds a list of assets to the request, with enough information for the linking functions to figure out which versions of which files to link.

Orthogonality

Different transformations aren't orthogonal. Some examples:

You can't add cache-busters first, and then bundle assets together, since you wouldn't get cache buster URLs on your bundles.
If you minify first, then bundle, you'll get suboptimal minification results in production. If you bundle first, then minify, you won't know which file is to blame for errors in development.
You should never add far-future expires headers unless the asset has a cache-buster URL.

So ordering matters. You can't just throw in another middleware, you have to order it just so-and-so. I started writing documentation for this in Catenate. It would say "If you're also using cache-busting middleware, make sure to place it after Catenate." After writing a few of those sentences, I came to the conclusion that they were not entirely separate things. Since they're so dependent on each other, they should live together.

There's also the case of when to optimize. In production you want to optimize once - either as a build step, or when starting the application. In development you don't want any optimization (unless you're debugging), but you still need to create the list of assets so you're able to link to it. This is something all the optimization middlewares would have to tackle on their own - basically each layer freezing their optimized assets on server start, and all but the last one doing so in vain.

Optimus' solution

Optimus solves this by creating a separate middleware stack for optimizations, that work on assets (not requests), and that can be done at different times by different asset-serving strategies.

So yes, the optimizations have been split into several middlewares. But not middlewares for the Ring stack. They are Asset-specific middlewares.

Optimus is open for extension

Even tho Optimus itself doesn't do transpiling, building a transpiler to use with Optimus is pretty nice. I created optimus-less as an example implementation.

You create a custom asset loader and plug it into Optimus' load-asset multimethod. Let :original-url be the original "styles.less", so the linking features can find it, replace the :contents with the compiled CSS, and serve it under the :path "styles.css".

It's about 20 lines of code, including requires. And adding support for more transpilers require no changes to Optimus itself.

Change log

There were breaking changes in 0.16, 0.17 and 0.19. If you're upgrading, you might want to read more about them.

From 0.19.0 to master

Use a fixed version of clj-v8 that does not crash when starting two processes using it at the same time.

From 0.18.5 to 0.19

We have updated to Clojure 1.8.0 and now require JDK 1.7 or higher.
Fixed loading issues with serve-live-assets-autorefresh

From 0.18 to 0.18.5

Like CSS before, JS-files with a single line over 5000 characters are now considered already minified, and skipped.
Avoid memory leak via clj-v8 contexts (Allen Rohner)
We now designate specific versions of our JavaScript dependencies, avoiding random breakage when these packages change.

From 0.17 to 0.18

A new strategy serve-live-assets-autorefresh is available. It watches for changes in assets source files and recompiles assets in the background whenever it's needed.
CSS files now adopt the newest modification time of its imports
Now doesn't fail when given outdated MicroSoft behavior CSS.

From 0.16 to 0.17

The optimus.hiccup namespace is removed in favor of optimus.html

The old optimus.hiccup/link-to-css-bundles created hiccup data structures, which is a mistake. It's specific to one rendering method, and Hiccup works just as well (or better) with strings.

If you were using optimus.hiccup, just replace it will optimus.html and all is well.

From 0.15 to 0.16

Optimus now uses clean-css instead of CSSO for minification.

CSSO was abandoned along with quite a few bugs. clean-css is faster, has fewer bugs, a comprehensive test suite, and is under active development.

See the new customization options for clean-css
Passing options to optimus.prime/wrap now uses a regular map

It used to take syntactic sugar varargs, but this actually makes it harder to use in practice. You now just pass in a map of options like a normal person. :)
Options are now grouped

The old {:mangle-js-names true} is now {:uglify-js {:mangle-names true}}. In the same fashion, the new options for clean-css is bundled under {:clean-css {...}}
CSS files with a single line over 5000 characters is considered already minified, and skipped. This avoid issues with huge bootstrap.css files and its ilk.

From 0.14 to 0.15

Add cache-busting hash to end of path instead of beginning. (Francis Avila)

This is so the root paths are still stable and predictable. For example, if a site keeps static files under /static, cache-busted files will still be under /static.

From 0.13 to 0.14

Support for @imports in CSS
Binary assets now has a :resource value instead of a :get-stream function
Removed inline clj-v8 now that official repo supports bundling in uberjars
Include both Cache-Control and Expires headers again, for Chrome's sake
Improved documentation and bugfixes

From 0.12 to 0.13

Add Last-Modified headers
Remove Cache-Control headers (superflous when serving Expires)
Create extension point for asset loading
Bugfixes

From 0.11 to 0.12

Move Angular.JS features into its own project.

From 0.10 to 0.11

Add support for :base-path on assets for CDNs.
Add exporting of assets to disk. Also for CDNs.

From 0.9 to 0.10

Split strategies and optimizations so they can vary independently.

Contribute

Yes, please do. And add tests for your feature or fix, or I'll certainly break it later.

Installing dependencies

You need npm installed to fetch the JavaScript dependencies. The actual fetching is automated however.

Running the tests

lein midje will run all tests.

lein midje namespace.* will run only tests beginning with "namespace.".

lein midje :autotest will run all the tests indefinitely. It sets up a watcher on the code files. If they change, only the relevant tests will be run again.

Contributors

Christian Johansen added CSS and JS minification.
Shaharz fixed a bug with external URLs in CSS-files.
Francis Avila improved placement of cache busters in URLs.
Anton Onyshchenko added the serve-live-assets-autorefresh strategy.
Allen Rohner fixed a memory leak.

Thanks!

License

Distributed under the Eclipse Public License, the same as Clojure.

lsnape/optimus