Spritely

Spritely hooks into the Sprockets asset packaging system to allow you to easily generate sprite maps.

See the list of releases for changes in each version.

Spritely provides a Sprockets preprocessor and transformer. It hooks into the processing stage of Sprockets compilation to generate a sprite image from a manifest file (in a very similar way to how application.css is processed). Several Sass functions are defined that are included into all other Sass scripting functions. If the image has not been generated (or is outdated), a request for the sprite will determine how to lay out the sprite, and then generate the image via ChunkyPNG, storing it in the Sprockets cache like all other compiled assets.

Add the gem to your gemfile

gem 'spritely'

Spritely takes advantage of Sprockets directives to define how a sprite should be generated. If you want to create a sprite map called application, create a app/assets/images/sprites/application.png.sprite manifest file. If you want just a default sprite map, leave the file blank. Otherwise, add any number of directives to the file (available directives are outlined below).

If you aren't doing anything special, you can use a Spritely-provided Sass mixin:

#icon {
  @include spritely-image("application", "icon");
}

The compiled CSS should look something like this:

#icon {
  background-image: url(/assets/sprites/application.png);
  background-position: 0 25px;
  width: 20px;
  height: 20px;
}

Otherwise, you can use the Spritely Sass functions directly:

#icon {
  background: {
    image: spritely-url("application");
    position: spritely-position("application", "icon");
  }
}

The compiled CSS should look something like this:

#icon {
  background-image: url(/assets/sprites/application.png);
  background-position: 0 25px;
}

Spritely utilizes Sprockets' depend_on and link_asset directives to listen to changes to existing images within a sprited folder. This, in addition to the cache being busted upon related stylesheet changes, takes care of 99 out of 100 cases of image changes.

You can customize the configuration of your sprite map by using these global directives.

If you have sprite images that are stored in a different location than the default (app/assets/images/[sprite-name]), you can override the directory that Spritely looks for images to sprite. To do so when a sprite's images are stored in app/assets/images/foo/bar:

//= directory foo/bar

You can sort images in the sprite based on name, width, height, or size:

//= sort width

To reverse the order, add a direction:

//= sort width desc

The default is name (asc is the default direction).

There are cases where you have images that need to be organized left-to-right rather than top-to-bottom. In those cases, you can configure the layout:

//= layout horizontal

The default value is vertical.

There are a few different image-related sprite map directives available to you. All of these are available as both global and per-image directives. Per-image directives overwrite global directives. Global directives are set just like per-image ones are, except they don't include an image name.

You can repeat the image horizontally. To do so for an image named arrow.png:

//= repeat arrow true

Note: While repetition can be done globally, you should exercise caution. If your globally-repeating sprite map has multiple oddly-shaped images (rather than small images like background tiles), your sprite map could get very large, and its generation/loading could severely slow down your computer. This is because, to correctly fill the space with whole copies of each image, Spritely has to determine the least common multiple of all repeated images. This means that for a sprite map with 4 repeating images with widths of [35px, 327px, 250px, 200px], your sprite will need to be 2289000px wide.

When you want to use a sprited image on the opposite side of an element, it's useful to position that image to the right/bottom (depending on the direction) of the sprite map. To do so for an image named arrow.png:

//= opposite arrow true

To do it for all images in a sprite map:

//= opposite true

There are sometimes cases where you want to add some extra spacing (or padding) above or below images in your sprite. To do so for an image named arrow.png:

//= spacing_before arrow 5
//= spacing_after arrow 10

This will add 5 pixels of spacing before arrow.png and 10 pixels of spacing after arrow.png within the sprite.

To do it for all images in a sprite map:

//= spacing_before 5
//= spacing_after 10

rspec spec

Spritely uses Appraisal to test against multiple versions of Rails. See their README for more information on how to run a particular suite.