Skip to content
  • About
    • What is Symfony?
    • Community
    • News
    • Contributing
    • Support
  • Documentation
    • Symfony Docs
    • Symfony Book
    • Screencasts
    • Symfony Bundles
    • Symfony Cloud
    • Training
  • Services
    • SensioLabs Professional services to help you with Symfony
    • Platform.sh for Symfony Best platform to deploy Symfony apps
    • SymfonyInsight Automatic quality checks for your apps
    • Symfony Certification Prove your knowledge and boost your career
    • Blackfire Profile and monitor performance of your apps
  • Other
  • Blog
  • Download
sponsored by SensioLabs
  1. Home
  2. Documentation
  3. Cookbook
  4. Assetic
  5. How to Apply an Assetic Filter to a Specific File Extension
  • Documentation
  • Book
  • Reference
  • Bundles
  • Cloud

Table of Contents

  • Filter a Single File
  • Filter Multiple Files
  • Filtering based on a File Extension

How to Apply an Assetic Filter to a Specific File Extension

Edit this page

Warning: You are browsing the documentation for Symfony 2.1, which is no longer maintained.

Read the updated version of this page for Symfony 6.2 (the current stable version).

How to Apply an Assetic Filter to a Specific File Extension

Assetic filters can be applied to individual files, groups of files or even, as you'll see here, files that have a specific extension. To show you how to handle each option, let's suppose that you want to use Assetic's CoffeeScript filter, which compiles CoffeeScript files into Javascript.

The main configuration is just the paths to coffee and node. These default respectively to /usr/bin/coffee and /usr/bin/node:

  • YAML
  • XML
  • PHP
1
2
3
4
5
6
# app/config/config.yml
assetic:
    filters:
        coffee:
            bin: /usr/bin/coffee
            node: /usr/bin/node
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
<!-- app/config/config.xml -->
<assetic:config>
    <assetic:filter
        name="coffee"
        bin="/usr/bin/coffee"
        node="/usr/bin/node" />
</assetic:config>
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
// app/config/config.php
$container->loadFromExtension('assetic', array(
    'filters' => array(
        'coffee' => array(
            'bin'  => '/usr/bin/coffee',
            'node' => '/usr/bin/node',
        ),
    ),
));

Filter a Single File

You can now serve up a single CoffeeScript file as JavaScript from within your templates:

  • Twig
  • PHP
1
2
3
{% javascripts '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/example.coffee' filter='coffee' %}
    <script src="{{ asset_url }}" type="text/javascript"></script>
{% endjavascripts %}
1
2
3
4
5
6
<?php foreach ($view['assetic']->javascripts(
    array('@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/example.coffee'),
    array('coffee')
) as $url): ?>
    <script src="<?php echo $view->escape($url) ?>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<?php endforeach; ?>

This is all that's needed to compile this CoffeeScript file and server it as the compiled JavaScript.

Filter Multiple Files

You can also combine multiple CoffeeScript files into a single output file:

  • Twig
  • PHP
1
2
3
4
5
{% javascripts '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/example.coffee'
               '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/another.coffee'
    filter='coffee' %}
    <script src="{{ asset_url }}" type="text/javascript"></script>
{% endjavascripts %}
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
<?php foreach ($view['assetic']->javascripts(
    array(
        '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/example.coffee',
        '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/another.coffee',
    ),
    array('coffee')
) as $url): ?>
    <script src="<?php echo $view->escape($url) ?>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<?php endforeach; ?>

Both the files will now be served up as a single file compiled into regular JavaScript.

Filtering based on a File Extension

One of the great advantages of using Assetic is reducing the number of asset files to lower HTTP requests. In order to make full use of this, it would be good to combine all your JavaScript and CoffeeScript files together since they will ultimately all be served as JavaScript. Unfortunately just adding the JavaScript files to the files to be combined as above will not work as the regular JavaScript files will not survive the CoffeeScript compilation.

This problem can be avoided by using the apply_to option in the config, which allows you to specify that a filter should always be applied to particular file extensions. In this case you can specify that the Coffee filter is applied to all .coffee files:

  • YAML
  • XML
  • PHP
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
# app/config/config.yml
assetic:
    filters:
        coffee:
            bin: /usr/bin/coffee
            node: /usr/bin/node
            apply_to: "\.coffee$"
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
<!-- app/config/config.xml -->
<assetic:config>
    <assetic:filter
        name="coffee"
        bin="/usr/bin/coffee"
        node="/usr/bin/node"
        apply_to="\.coffee$" />
</assetic:config>
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
// app/config/config.php
$container->loadFromExtension('assetic', array(
    'filters' => array(
        'coffee' => array(
            'bin'      => '/usr/bin/coffee',
            'node'     => '/usr/bin/node',
            'apply_to' => '\.coffee$',
        ),
    ),
));

With this, you no longer need to specify the coffee filter in the template. You can also list regular JavaScript files, all of which will be combined and rendered as a single JavaScript file (with only the .coffee files being run through the CoffeeScript filter):

  • Twig
  • PHP
1
2
3
4
5
{% javascripts '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/example.coffee'
               '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/another.coffee'
               '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/regular.js' %}
    <script src="{{ asset_url }}" type="text/javascript"></script>
{% endjavascripts %}
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
<?php foreach ($view['assetic']->javascripts(
    array(
        '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/example.coffee',
        '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/another.coffee',
        '@AcmeFooBundle/Resources/public/js/regular.js',
    )
) as $url): ?>
    <script src="<?php echo $view->escape($url) ?>" type="text/javascript"></script>
<?php endforeach; ?>
This work, including the code samples, is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-SA 3.0 license.
TOC
    Version
    We stand with Ukraine.
    Version:
    Measure & Improve Symfony Code Performance

    Measure & Improve Symfony Code Performance

    Peruse our complete Symfony & PHP solutions catalog for your web development needs.

    Peruse our complete Symfony & PHP solutions catalog for your web development needs.

    Symfony footer

    ↓ Our footer now uses the colors of the Ukrainian flag because Symfony stands with the people of Ukraine.

    Avatar of Giovanni Toraldo, a Symfony contributor

    Thanks Giovanni Toraldo for being a Symfony contributor

    1 commit • 2 lines changed

    View all contributors that help us make Symfony

    Become a Symfony contributor

    Be an active part of the community and contribute ideas, code and bug fixes. Both experts and newcomers are welcome.

    Learn how to contribute

    Symfony™ is a trademark of Symfony SAS. All rights reserved.

    • What is Symfony?

      • Symfony at a Glance
      • Symfony Components
      • Case Studies
      • Symfony Releases
      • Security Policy
      • Logo & Screenshots
      • Trademark & Licenses
      • symfony1 Legacy
    • Learn Symfony

      • Symfony Docs
      • Symfony Book
      • Reference
      • Bundles
      • Best Practices
      • Training
      • eLearning Platform
      • Certification
    • Screencasts

      • Learn Symfony
      • Learn PHP
      • Learn JavaScript
      • Learn Drupal
      • Learn RESTful APIs
    • Community

      • SymfonyConnect
      • Support
      • How to be Involved
      • Code of Conduct
      • Events & Meetups
      • Projects using Symfony
      • Downloads Stats
      • Contributors
      • Backers
    • Blog

      • Events & Meetups
      • A week of symfony
      • Case studies
      • Cloud
      • Community
      • Conferences
      • Diversity
      • Documentation
      • Living on the edge
      • Releases
      • Security Advisories
      • SymfonyInsight
      • Twig
      • SensioLabs
    • Services

      • SensioLabs services
      • Train developers
      • Manage your project quality
      • Improve your project performance
      • Host Symfony projects

      Deployed on

    Follow Symfony

    Search by Algolia