Asset Management

What are assets?

Assets are all the static files needed for Betty to run or generate your site, but that are not source code files. Examples of assets:

  • imagery

  • CSS and JavaScript files

  • (Jinja2) templates

  • translations

The assets repository

Betty comes with an Assets API that layers the assets provided by all the different components. Each time an asset is needed, Betty finds it as follows:

  1. If the project provides the asset in its assets directory, use it

  2. If an extension provides the asset in its assets directory, use it

  3. If a built-in translation asset exists, use it (/betty/assets within the Betty source code)

This means that extensions can override Betty’s default assets, and your projects can override both extensions’ and Betty’s assets.

Assets directories

For each of Betty’s default assets, extensions’ assets, and your projects’ assets, the assets directory follows the following structure:

locale/

Contains assets for different locales.

locale/betty.pot

The gettext translatable message catalog.

locale/$locale/betty.po

Where $locale is an IETF BCP 47 language tag, betty.po is the gettext translations file for that locale.

public/

Contains files that become part of your sites.

public/localized/

Contains files that will be localized when generating your sites.

For sites with a single language, this effectively overrides public/static on a per-file basis.

On multilingual sites, these files end up in a subdirectory based on the locale they are rendered in: public/localized/my-page.html.j2 will be accessible on your site through https://example.com/en/my-page.html for an English locale, for example.

Examples of files that should be put here are any files that contain localizable (translatable) content, which will likely be most, if not all of your HTML pages.

public/static/

Contains static files that become part of your sites. public/static/my-file.txt will be accessible on your site through https://example.com/my-file.txt.

Examples of files that should often be put here are CSS and JavaScript files, images for your site’s look and feel, and metadata files such as robots.txt and sitemap.xml.

templates/

Contains (Jinja2) templates.