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How to compile assets

Some components in PrestaShop, like Javascript or SCSS files, need to be compiled to be usable.

Requirements

We use Webpack to compile assets. PrestaShop is using NodeJS (get it here), NPM will take care of it all.

Here is a list of compatibility:

PrestaShop Versions NodeJS Versions NPM Versions
8.x 14.x or 16.x 7.x or 8.x

If you can not manage to compile assets, you may be using an older version of PrestaShop. We strongly recommend you to install a package such as ’n’ or nvm to try with an older version of NodeJS.

On Windows, you will probably need to install windows-build-tools using npm i --global windows-build-tools in order to make node-gyp working.

Assets that need to be compiled

  • Back Office
    • Default theme
      • SASS files
        Located in admin-dev/themes/default/sass
    • New theme
      • SCSS files
        Located in admin-dev/themes/new-theme/scss
      • JS files
        Located in admin-dev/themes/new-theme/js
  • Front Office
    • Core assets
      • JS files
        Located in themes/_core/js
    • Classic theme
      • SCSS files
        Located in themes/classic/_dev/css
      • JS files
        Located in themes/classic/_dev/js

Compiling assets

  1. Switch to the root of the subproject
    Subproject Path
    Default theme cd admin-dev/themes/default/
    New theme cd admin-dev/themes/new-theme/
    FO Core cd themes/
    Classic theme cd themes/classic/_dev/
  1. Run npm install (first time only)

    npm install
    
  2. Run webpack

    npm run build
    

Build all assets at once

You can rebuild all the assets at once by executing this command from the project root:

./tools/assets/build.sh
# or alternatively
make assets

Watching for changes

You can also make webpack listen for changes and compile only what’s needed as you work on your files:

npm run watch

Rebuild your changes before committing.

The “watch” build will optimize your assets for development. Please remember to rebuild for production when you are done using npm run build.

Troubleshooting

If npm install fails with error: Failed at the ... postinstall script.:

You may be using an old version or one we don’t support yet. As of 8.0, every folder containing a package.json is compatible with node 12. How we manage to work with this, as well as working on previous PrestaShop version, is that we use a tool to easily swap between node version.

There are a lot of tools able to do this. At PrestaShop, we mainly use the ’n’ package or nvm. This is pretty easy to use, when you are working on a directory which need an older or newer node version, use one of these tools to switch and then npm install && npm run build.