Make markupFile optional

[oscarotero]

Hi!.
Is it possible to make the markupFile optional? I don't need to inject the markup in the html pages so I'd like to don't generate this file, and leaving it empty generates an error.
I guess it's just adding an if here: https://github.com/RealFaviconGenerator/gulp-real-favicon/blob/master/index.js#L30

[phbernard]

Alright.

Just for me to know: why don't you want this file? The favicon package is almost useless if you don't save the related markups.

[oscarotero]

I have a dinamic PHP site. The urls of the assets are generated using a function like asset('/css/styles.css'). This allows to work in different environments. For example, in local, the web is accesible from http://localhost/my-site, but in the server is http://my-site.com. So I added the markups in the php template and use the asset() function to resolve the full path according to the current context. So, the only I need is to convert a "favicon.png" to the bunch of pngs/ico needed and save them in the public accesible directory.

[phbernard]

I understand the spirit. This is similar to what rails_real_favicon is doing... for Rails.

I would like to understand how you managed the markups in the first place: you generated them via RFG, then manually copied them to your PHP template and edited them to use the asset function. And now you don't want the plugin to mess up with your changes. Is that correct?

[oscarotero]

Yes, that's correct.

BTW, I'm open to other ways to solve this. For example, a cross-language solution could be an agnostic json with the objective data that can be used to generate the markups by other languages. In php could be something like:

$favicons = json_decode(file_get_contents('realFaviconGeneratorData.json'), true);

foreach ($favicons['meta'] as $meta) {
   echo sprintf('<meta name="%s" content="%s">', $meta['name'], asset($meta['filename']));
}
foreach ($favicons['link'] as $link) {
   echo sprintf('<link rel="%s" href="%s">', $link['rel'], asset($link['filename']));
}

(I know this requires more work, it's just to illustrate the main idea)

[phbernard]

That's an elegant solution to the problem. I was about to fill an enhancement issue for this but realized something is missing: manifest.json and browserconfig.xml, generated along with the icons, need to be patched too. So returning the HTML markups as JSON hashes doesn't solve the issue entirely.

rails_real_favicon uses a small trick to do the job: in the request, it asks for a very specific path (eg. /421fsd). Therefore, everything the API returns (HTML, files...) contains this string (eg. href="/421fsd/favicon.ico"). Then it's easy for the plugin to do a massive seach-and-replace (eg. href="<%= asset_path('favicon.ico') ?>"). It's not pretty, but safe and simple (it handles a JSON and an XML file just the same... good point!).

This said, this is a bit overkill for you. I mean: this is only the favicon of your project.

[oscarotero]

You're right, I forgot manifest and browserconfig.
A solution could be provide language specific libraries to generate all this stuff. For example:

$generator = new RealFaviconGenerator('/path/to/data.json');

// $filesystemAccess, $publicAccess
$generator->setPublicPath('/path/to/document/root', '/');

//generate the html markup
echo $generator->dumpMarkup();

//save the manifest
$generator->saveManifest();

//save the browser config
$generator->saveBrowserConfig();