This is a VERY TEMPORARY AND EXPERIMENTAL rails 3.1 project.

I am using it to decide what changes I need to make to the sprite-factory gem in upcoming v1.4.0 to make it fit better with the rails 3.1 asset pipeline

To use new version (1.4.0) of sprite-factory with rails 3.1 you should...

Add sprite-factory to your Gemfile

Plus its image library dependency (either rmagick or chunkypng)

group :assets do
  # ...
  gem 'sprite-factory', '>= 1.4.0'
  gem 'chunky_png'
end

Store sprite images in app/assets/images sub-folders

E.g

app/assets/images/avatars/*.png
app/assets/images/icons/*.png
...

Create a Rake task for regenerating your sprites

E.g. in lib/tasks/assets.rake

namespace :assets do

  desc 'recreate sprite images and css'
  task :resprite => :environment do 

    require 'sprite_factory'

    SpriteFactory.report  = true         # output report during generation
    SpriteFactory.library = :chunkypng   # use simple chunkypng gem to handle .png sprite generation
    SpriteFactory.layout  = :packed      # pack sprite sheets into optimized rectangles
    SpriteFactory.csspath = "<%= asset_path '$IMAGE' %>" #  ensure correct cache-busting urls are used within generated css file

    SpriteFactory.run!('app/assets/images/avatars', :output_style => 'app/assets/stylesheets/avatars.css.erb')
    SpriteFactory.run!('app/assets/images/icons',   :output_style => 'app/assets/stylesheets/icons.css.erb',  :selector => 'img.icon_')

  end

end

NOTE: the :csspath option embeds erb into the generated css file to allow Rails to provide the correct path to the images, along with cache-busting version numbers if necessary.

NOTE: the :output_style option is used to override the default behavior and instead of generating the css file alongside the image, it saves it in the app/assets/stylesheets folder so that it will automatically get picked up by the rails asset pipeline. It is also given a .erb extension to tell the asset pipeline to process with ERB in order to evaluate the

asset_path calls.

Add a #sprite_tag helper

E.g. in application_helper.rb

def sprite_tag(klass, options = {})
  image_tag('s.gif', {:class => klass, :alt => klass}.merge(options))
end

Use the #sprite_tag helper

Somewhere in a view, lets show a sprite

<%= sprite_tag('icon_email') %>
<%= sprite_tag('avatar7')    %>

GO!

Run your rake task to generate the unified .png and .css files

bundle exec rake assets:resprite

View your page in a browser

• BOOYA!