Automatically generating an HTML5 cache manifest

Posted on Monday, September 26, 2011 @ 10:34 CET

When we were developing fotb.me we ensured the app would run offline using the fancy, new HTML5 app cache API. It can be a pain to create the cache manifest file by hand, this is obviously something that should be automated.

I looked around and found a plugin for Coda and a bundle for TextMate and TextWrangler which are good, but they don't allow me to ignore certain files and only add certain filetypes which were two things I needed. Not wanting to have to remember to edit the generated files manually I rolled our own.

CacheManifestGenerator is a simple Ruby script that traverses any folder recursively and makes a note of each file. You can add specific files to be ignored and the specific file extensions to look for. Very, very simple yet effective.

It also adds a comment with the time of creation. This is enough to trigger browsers to check the manifest contents as the file itself is different.

Oh and btw, Ruby is fun!

Update:

John Allsopp reminded me of manifestR, an online tool that creates a manifest for any page you are visiting via a bookmarklet. Very cool stuff, but it didn't work for us as the site has to be online, not be password protected (something we were avoiding pre-launch) and also the ignore files bit I mentioned above. However if you don't need those things then its definitely the easiest way of generating a manifest automatically.

- paulo

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