This command line tool walks a directory and generates a JSON dictionary of all assets/files in the directory.

Download or clone the repo, cd into the folder, and run make. That will compile the executable. To install it, run make install (if it asks for a password, please provide it).

The command takes the form

$ assets <directory>

where <directory> is the path to the folder whose assets you want to examine.

For instance, type this:

$ assets .

That will print to the screen a JSON dictionary of all assets found in the current directory (including assets in any subfolders). The JSON structure should look something like this:

[
  {
    "key": "file1",
    "directory": "/home/users/sally/",
    "filename": "file1.txt",
    "extension": "txt",
  },
  ...
]

You can specify any directory you like. For instance,

$ assets /home/public_html/public/images

will examine /home/public_html/public/images.

By default, the assets tool prints the JSON to stdout (typically the screen), but you can pipe the output to a file if you like:

$ assets . >> assets.json

Or, you can simply specify the name of the file as the second argument:

$ assets . assets.json

If you want the assets program to cachebust your filenames, use the --cachebust flag:

$ assets . --cachebust

That will rename all files by appending the md5 hash of the file. Files named in the form <filename>.<extension> become <filename>.<md5-hash>.<extension>.

If you want to ignore files or directories, use --ignore, followed by a comma separated list of filenames. For insance:

$ assets . --ignore .git,.gitignore,dist

To include a base64 encoded string of the files' contents, use --base64 followed by the maximum number of characters your base64 encoded strings can be.

$ assets . --base64 12000