Theme asset files are not overwritten properly (trying to update FontAwesome)

[BenjaminJurke]

• This is a question about using the theme.
• I believe this to be a bug with the theme --- not Jekyll, GitHub Pages or one of the bundled plugins.
• This is a feature request.
• I have updated all gems with bundle update.
• I have tested locally with bundle exec jekyll build.

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Environment informations

• Minimal Mistakes version: 4.1.0
• github-pages or jekyll gem version: 3.3.1
• Operating system: Ubuntu 16.10 x64

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Expected behavior

I tried to update the FontAwesome 4.6.3 that is bundled within the Minimal Mistakes theme to the most recent version 4.7.0. The local _sass/vendor/font-awesome/ folder is easily updated by replacing the files and a minimal renaming of the main _font-awesome.scss file (adding the leading underscore). However, updating the actual font files in the local assets/fonts/ folder does NOT update the files in the destination output.

Naturally, I would expect my local source files to replace the default theme files in the destination folder.

I also tried adding the assets/fonts/ folder to the keep_files in the _config.yml in order to preserve a manual update of the relevant font files after the Jekyll run, but even then the theme files are used and overwrite my replacement,

Steps to reproduce the behavior

See above. However, I am not sure if this a theme error, a general Jekyll error or entirely my own stupidity...

[mmistakes]

Smells like a Jekyll error to me. Bundled assets folder support is fairly new so it's possible there are bugs and the local versions are not overriding the bundled ones.

If I get time this week I'll test it and see if I notice the same issue you're having.

In the meantime can you verify its not a browser caching issue. Can you diff the updated files inassets/fonts against _site/assets/fonts after a build just to double check. If they're the same then that tells me your browser is caching the old assets. If the'yre different then it's likely a bug with Jekyll as the theme has nothing to do with processing files.

[BenjaminJurke]

This is definitely not a browser caching issue. I cleared my browser cache multiple times and cleared the jekyll caching (jekyll clean). Ultimately, I noticed that the files in the _site/assets/fonts folder are of different (smaller = older) size compared to my assets/fonts folder with the new ones. This is clearly visible at the local file level, with no browsers involved at all. There is no difference between jekyll build or jekyll serve.

It is noteworthy that additional files (i.e. files that are not overwriting asset files from the theme) are processed correctly, i.e. they are properly added to the _site/assets/... folder as expected. The issue only seems to hit static asset files that are supposed to overwrite files from the theme gem. As mentioned, the keep_files directive does not work as one would expect as well.

For the moment I would be happy if you could simply update the Font Awesome package in the next gem theme version, but this is obviously just a workaround and not the core of the issue.

In any case: congratulation and thanks for this overall awesome Jekyll theme! :-)

[mmistakes]

Ok. I'll take a look and see if I can reproduce. Will have to file an issue upstream since it seems to be Jekyll related.

I don't think setting keep_files will make any difference. Pretty sure there is a bug in how the assets folder is handled with respect to theme gems. As I alluded to above the feature is relatively new and likely not widely used so I wouldn't be surprised that it has a few kinks left to iron out.

[mmistakes]

PS I opened an issue to update Font Awesome #723. Not sure when I'll get to it but if you'd like to submit a pull request it should be a relatively easy one to knock out.

[mmistakes]

Just got around to testing this and I was able to reproduce it. Looks like there might be a bug with Jekyll and how it handles files in /assets/ which is out of my hands to correct.

Best I can tell files with YAML Front Matter override fine ie: assets/css/main.scss, but when I try to override any of the files in assets/fonts or assets/js they spit out the theme gem versions.

When I get a chance I'll file an issue on jekyll/jekyll and see where that leads.

[mmistakes]

Bug filed jekyll/jekyll#5676

[BenjaminJurke]

Great, thanks for your effort.

Like you mentioned, the override seems to work for files, that are actually being processed by Jekyll. The font files, as far as I can tell, are essentially just being copied over to the output folder. I guess, there may be very small bug somewhere in Jekyll for this particular case (overriding static unprocessed files from the theme). Additional files in the asset folder are handled correctly.

[BenjaminJurke]

Just saw the theme update to 4.1.1 - thanks for the super-fast update! Thumbs up!

(Yes, I know, this does not fix the underlying issue, but at the moment solves my specific problem :) )

[mmistakes]

@BenjaminJurke 😃

[mmistakes]

additional reference issue: jekyll/jekyll#5704

[mmistakes]

Closing as this is an upstream issue.

[mmistakes]

@BenjaminJurke FYI I found a workaround until this is fixed upstream. If I add YAML Front Matter to main.min.js it can be overridden. In the next release of MM I'll push it out. All you'll have to do is add:

---
---

to the top of your modified /assets/js/main.min.js file and it should override the theme gem's version.

[BenjaminJurke]

Well, since you updated FontAwesome in the gem my issue has been resolved.

However, I recently stumbled over something that may be related: I recently used your theme for a German language website, i.e. I am using localizations for the first time. But it appears that the translations in the ui-text.yml file (which is part of the theme and should be in the gem) are only used if the file is locally present. It is not a big issue, since I can simply copy the file from the repository into the _data directory and everything works fine. However, one would naively expect this to work without the file present, i.e. defaulting to the file in the gem.

This appears to be (at least somewhat) related, because once again processing of local and gem-default files is handled differently (unexpected), in this particular case the local variants appear to have preference. Jekyll and theme are at the most recent version - I basically run bundle update whenever I do some work on my site.

Like I said, not a real issue, but maybe something worth looking into it.

[mmistakes]

@BenjaminJurke That's another issue. Jekyll only reads _layouts, _includes, _sass and /assets that are included in a theme gem. _config.yml and _data files whether they're included in the gem or not don't get pulled in by Jekyll.

There's been talk about bringing them in (which I'm in favor of) since it reduces the friction of starting with a theme gem. Right now you have to physically copy over the files from the MM repo.

Ref: jekyll/jekyll#5470

[BenjaminJurke]

OK, I see - was not aware of this.