Loading Different Javascript/CSS Files in Different Environments

Today we were working on minifying our Javascript and CSS files for a site we are launching tomorrow.  We came across that we didn’t want to have to get the repository out of sync and update view.yml to only include our single CSS style sheet and one javascript file when working between developement environment and production.  What we wanted was the following in view.yml the javascripts: and stylesheets: parameters to change depending on what environment you are loading, however using prod: and dev: in this didn’t work like app.yml does.  An example of this would be:

all:
  title: My site
dev:
  stylesheets:[styleone.css,styletwo.css,stylethree.css]
  javascripts:[one.js,two.js,three.js]
prod:
  stylesheets:[style.min.css]
  javascripts:[main.min.js]

This way we could have them load in production much quicker and reduce load time, however still easily debug the files in development environments.  After looking around a bit we couldn’t find any standard current solution so we came up with the following.  In app.yml we defined two variables for the dev and production environments – javascript_files and css_files.  Here you put the list of the files you wanted to loaded in each environment.  Then in view.yml it now looks like:

all:
  title: My Title
  stylesheets: [<?php echo sfConfig::get('app_css_files');?>]
  javascripts: [<?php echo sfConfig::get('app_javascript_files');?>]

The configuration variables get their value depending on the environment you are running in so it loads the proper files.  With this configuration we can easily debug in development environment and still have minified versions of the CSS and Javascript in production environement.   Hopefully this will save some of you time and make your life easier.