Jekyll-assets not compatible with Jekyll 4.0

[metrix78]

• I tried updating to the latest version
  • I can't, there is an issue
  • This is about an < latest
    • I understand older versions may be unsupported
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Description

Making a new project that uses jekyll-assets and jekyll 3.8.6 works fine, but when upgrading
to Jekyll 4.0.0 assets does not appear to be called.

Steps

use the following shell script to setup test environment

#!/bin/bash
set -o errexit
set -o pipefail
set -o nounset

echo 'removing broke'
#rm -Rf broke

echo 'creating broke'
mkdir broke
cd broke
echo 'gem "jekyll"' >> Gemfile
echo 'gem "jekyll-assets"' >> Gemfile

echo 'creating new blog'
bundle exec jekyll new blog
cd blog
echo 'gem "jekyll-assets"' >> Gemfile
bundle install

echo 'setting up the failure state'

#make an abc javascript file.
mkdir -p assets/javascript/abc
echo "//test javascript file." >> assets/javascript/abc/index.js

#add asset to index.md
echo '{% asset abc.js %}' >> index.md


cat > _config.yml <<EOF
# Welcome to Jekyll!
#
# This config file is meant for settings that affect your whole blog, values
# which you are expected to set up once and rarely edit after that. If you find
# yourself editing this file very often, consider using Jekyll's data files
# feature for the data you need to update frequently.
#
# For technical reasons, this file is *NOT* reloaded automatically when you use
# 'bundle exec jekyll serve'. If you change this file, please restart the server process.

# Site settings
# These are used to personalize your new site. If you look in the HTML files,
# you will see them accessed via {{ site.title }}, {{ site.email }}, and so on.
# You can create any custom variable you would like, and they will be accessible
# in the templates via {{ site.myvariable }}.
title: Your awesome title
email: your-email@example.com
description: >- # this means to ignore newlines until "baseurl:"
  Write an awesome description for your new site here. You can edit this
  line in _config.yml. It will appear in your document head meta (for
  Google search results) and in your feed.xml site description.
baseurl: "" # the subpath of your site, e.g. /blog
url: "" # the base hostname & protocol for your site, e.g. http://example.com
twitter_username: jekyllrb
github_username:  jekyll

# Build settings
markdown: kramdown
theme: minima
plugins:
  - jekyll-feed
  - jekyll-assets

# Exclude from processing.
# The following items will not be processed, by default. Create a custom list
# to override the default setting.
# exclude:
#   - Gemfile
#   - Gemfile.lock
#   - node_modules
#   - vendor/bundle/
#   - vendor/cache/
#   - vendor/gems/
#   - vendor/ruby/
EOF


echo 'build'
bundle exec jekyll b

Output

Running the above command will work fine:

      Generating...
       Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
                    done in 0.75 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: disabled. Use --watch to enable.

but if you:

• change the version of Jekyll in broke/blog/Gemfile to 4.0.0
• cd broke/blog
• bundle update
• bundle exec jekyll b

You will get:

 bundle exec jekyll b
Configuration file: /home/metrix/code/broke/blog/_config.yml
            Source: /home/metrix/code/broke/blog
       Destination: /home/metrix/code/broke/blog/_site
 Incremental build: disabled. Enable with --incremental
      Generating...
       Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
  Liquid Exception: Couldn't find file 'abc.js' in index.md
                    ------------------------------------------------
      Jekyll 4.0.0   Please append `--trace` to the `build` command
                     for any additional information or backtrace.
                    ------------------------------------------------

Expected

The abc.js should have been built with no error like so:

      Generating...
       Jekyll Feed: Generating feed for posts
                    done in 0.75 seconds.
 Auto-regeneration: disabled. Use --watch to enable.

[metrix78]

I think the following section of the 3.x to 4.x upgrade documentation states what the issues is:

If its a requirement that template you get from the above step be different at all times, you can invoke Liquid::Template directly:

- template = site.liquid_renderer.file(path).parse(content)
+ template = Liquid::Template.parse(content)

I don't know enough about how jekyll assets works, but I would guess line 186 of utils.rb needs to be modified:

        when obj.is_a?(String)
          k = Digest::SHA256.hexdigest(obj)[0, 6]
          ctx.registers[:site].liquid_renderer.file("(asset:var:#{k})")
            .parse(obj).render!(ctx)
        else

[metrix78]

Digging further, I see what happened. Upgrading to Jekyll 4 makes Bundler try to find the first version compatible. 1.0 is marked to be compatible with Jekyll < 5.0, so it gets installed.

[flipacholas]

Manually setting the Gemfile to get all the cutting edge dependencies:

gem 'jekyll-assets', :git => 'https://github.com/envygeeks/jekyll-assets.git'
gem 'jekyll-sanity', :git => 'https://github.com/envygeeks/jekyll-sanity.git'
gem 'sprockets', '4.0.0.beta8'

will still result in

Dependency Error: Yikes! It looks like you don't have jekyll-assets or one of its dependencies installed. In order to use Jekyll as currently configured, you'll need to install this gem. If you've run Jekyll with `bundle exec`, ensure that you have included the jekyll-assets gem in your Gemfile as well. The full error message from Ruby is: 'cannot load such file -- sass' If you run into trouble, you can find helpful resources at https://jekyllrb.com/help/! 
------------------------------------------------
Jekyll 4.0.0   Please append `--trace` to the `build` command for any additional information or backtrace. 
------------------------------------------------

Which doesn't happen using Jekyll 3.8.6

[flipacholas]

Finally got it working, this setup should be provisional but it works if you want to make the jump to 4.0.0:

group :jekyll_plugins do
    gem 'jekyll-assets', :git => 'https://github.com/kou/jekyll-assets.git', :branch => 'add-support-for-sprockets-4.0'
    gem 'jekyll-sanity', :git => 'https://github.com/envygeeks/jekyll-sanity.git'
    gem 'sass'
end

Branch used comes from #620

[nhoizey]

@flipacholas I tried this, but there are issues with some assets.

You can compare these two pages for example:

• https://nicolas-hoizey.com (repo)
• https://jekyll4.nicolas-hoizey.com (repo)

What I see:

• syntax like {% asset "early-js" @inline %} for inline JS works as before, but {% asset "critical-styles" @inline %} for inline CSS (compiled from Sass) doesn't work anymore (there is nothing produced in the resulting HTML)
• syntax like {% asset "non-critical-styles" @path %} generates the path to the (hashed) source Sass file instead of the generated CSS file
• syntax like {% asset "non-critical-styles" %} for linked CSS doesn't work anymore (there is nothing produced in the resulting HTML)

All these examples come from this include.

I don't know if these are known issues, or syntax changes I should make in my templates, I'll try to find out.

[flipacholas]

@nhoizey I also ran into a lot of problems with css (in my case with making autoprefixers work) and to be honest I started migrating to webpack to process sass and js some weeks ago, I don't regret it at all.

Jekyll-assets is a great plugin, but I ended up doing a lot of monkey-patching with ruby (to include code from pending pull-requests) and I also don't know what are the future prospects about this project, so I just offloaded the critical bits.

[nhoizey]

@flipacholas I wanted to migrate to Jekyll 4 to have a real project on which testing my own plugins, but I plan anyway to leave Jekyll for Eleventy, so it might not be worth losing time on this… 😢

I agree Jekyll-Assets is a great plugin I've been using for years, but Jekyll's future concerns me even more.

[nhoizey]

Asside from these parts missing in the output, I get build times around 600 seconds instead of 80 seconds with Jekyll 3, and a flame graph shows uglifier taking 80% of this build time.

[nhoizey]

It looks like it might be related to this sprockets issue: rails/sprockets#640

[lucascaton]

Any news on this?

[envygeeks]

Do we need to add Sprockets.export_concurrent = false?

[metrix78]

Looks like Sprockets has set export_concurrent to false by default: rails/sprockets#581

[envygeeks]

That's a little relieving! I'm gonna close this for now then since the specs are passing for both Sprockets 4, and Jekyll 4 on master. If this arises again please file a ticket!