Speed Up Asset Builds with Airdrop for Laravel

 Airdrop is a package for Laravel that speeds up code deployments by skipping asset builds whenever possible.

Airdrop calculates the hash of everything needed in your build assets (i.e., packages, JS, CSS, etc.). If Airdrop encounters the same hash, it will skip the asset build step and pull down built assets via Laravel’s File System API. It stores build assets in the filesystem of your choosing as a .zip file, typically a cloud provider like S3.

The gist of how it works is that once you’ve installed and configured Airdrop, you’ll add these commands to your pipeline:

1php artisan airdrop:download
2npm run production
3php artisan airdrop:upload

Depending on how you intend to skip asset building, the npm run production step will skip building assets if a .airdrop_skip dotfile exists.

Here’s a more in-depth bash example from the deployment documentation:

 1php artisan airdrop:download
 2 
 3# Skip several steps if we can.
 4if [ ! -f ".airdrop_skip" ]; then
 5    nvm install
 6    nvm use
 7    yarn install --frozen-lockfile
 8    npm run production
 9 
10fi
11 
12php artisan airdrop:upload

Lastly, if for some reason you can’t work with the built-in Filesystem driver that ships with Airdrop (to upload and download assets), you can define a PHP class that extends the package’s BaseDriver:

 1use Hammerstone\Airdrop\Drivers\BaseDriver;
 2 
 3class CustomDriver extends BaseDriver
 4{
 5    // Called after building, to stash the files somewhere.
 6    public function upload(){}
 7 
 8    // Called before building files, to see if we can skip
 9    public function download() {}
10}

Learn More

You can learn more about this package and view the source code on GitHub. Check out the official documentation for an in-depth guide on getting started and configuring your deployments. Please pay special attention to the deployment documentation to ensure you skip building assets when they haven’t changed.