City of Malmö’s intranet assets are served from a central asset host and are consumed by web applications on the organizations intranet. The assets contains a common base for the UI such as a masthead, footer, form styling, page layouts, styling for articles, widgets, and components.
Purpose of the intranet assets:
- It gives all web applications a consistent UI for the user.
- Common changes are deployed in one place and the changes are reflected immediately in all web applications.
- It decreases the load time for the end user since the majority of stylesheet and Javascript code will be cached in the browser instead of being fetch from each application.
- It speeds up development.
Apart from the common assets consumed by all applications, each application contains it’s own unique assets for additional features not included in the common assets. The application specific assets are served by the applications themselves.
For more information, contact [email protected].
Instructions for how you use the global assets in your application is documented in City of Malmö's Web Application Guidelines.
- Ruby 2.x
- Bundler
A web server optimized to serve static files. Ruby is not needed on the server.
The assets are developed using Sprockets and the Asset Pipeline in a stripped down Ruby on Rails-application. The application is only used for development, testing, build and deployment. You can use the application as a local asset host when you are developing or adapting other applications to the global assets.
To install the required Ruby gems, run:
$ bundle install
Start the local asset server:
$ rails s -p 3001
You might need to map a domain name to your local host like www.local.malmo.se to debug and test the JavaScript code.
Use the local views in the asset application for the visual part of the development. You can also point another locally installed web application your started asset server.
Capistrano is used for build and deployment to the server. Sass and Javascript files are concatenated and minified. Run the deployment script by including the environment name in the command:
To change the Capistrano deployment configuration:
- Copy
config/deploy.yml.exampletoconfig/deploy.ymland change the settings. - Edit
config/deploy.rband the environment files in theconfig/deploy/directory if necessary.
$ cap staging deploy
$ cap production deploy
The compression levels for CSS and Javascript files are configured in config/environments/ for development, staging and production.
The assets contains Sass code compiled to CSS, Coffeescript compiled to JavaScript, web fonts and an icon font.
Fundamentals for the intranet assets:
- They must be highly optimized for load, execution and rendering speed.
- Have a long life cycle. The code from the asset host must be backward compatible for a long time since a lot of web application are consuming them and can’t be updated on a continues basis.
- There is no room for extensive testing of all consuming web applications. It just have to work.
The intranet assets are developed using Sprockets and the Assets Pipeline in a stripped-down Ruby on Rails application. It is used in development and deployment but not in production. It can be used as a local asset server during development and when developing or adapting other applications for the intranet.
You must set a fully qualified domain name in the host file for your local development environment. such as www.local.malmo.se.
Stylesheets are written in Sass with the SCSS syntax and organized in smaller files. All files, except for IE specifics, are imported in the malmo.css.scss file. The files are served uncompressed in development and concatenated to one compressed file, malmo.css with a Rake task by Capistrano in the build process.
All sizes must be set in em or percentage units. Use the emize() Sass function defined in functions.scss to get a consistent output for font sizes. Thin border widths can be declared with 1px.
Do not set font sizes in global contexts, e.g. for all menus or for all p or h1 elements. Specify it on a detailed level to avoid overrides and complex calculations that will break when the context is changed.
Do not use too deeply nested Sass blocks, this will make it hard to override the selectors in media queries.
All media queries are defined in media_queries.css.scss. This file is imported as the last entry in malmo.css.scss.
For available Sass functions, mixins and defined variables, see each file with that name. Always use variables for colors.
The columns() mixin is used to define responsive column layouts that and is altered in the media query file.
Use Coffeescript for JavaScript development and organize it in smaller files that will be imported in the malmo.js file using the Sprockets syntax. The files are automatically served as individual files in the development application for easy debugging and concatenated and compressed in the build phase.
The common masthead that must be on every intranet application page is found in app/assets/content/masthead.html.erb. The code is transform to a Javascript string during the Capistrano build process for fast injection on every intranet page or view. To transform and display it during development, run the following task:
$ rake build:mastheadUse the icon font for icons, not png images or sprites.
For gradients, rounded corners and related stuff, use CSS3. Use solid background colors as a fallback. Use the Sass mixins for vendor prefixes to keep the code clean.
See the repository’s readme file.
Third party code resides in vendor/assets. The code is included in the global stylesheet and Javascript file in the development environment as well as in the build process.
Third party code and components are added to the intranet assets with caution, no brute force incorporation of frameworks and code without qualification. City of Malmö’s intranet assets is an enterprise level solution and must be maintained with all consuming applications in mind.
Released under AGPL version 3.
The vendor directory contains third party code that may be released under other licenses stated in the start of each file.