The idea of Initializr API is pretty simple. You can either download an archive or display its content. Just ping this URL to get an archive of Initializr:
http://www.initializr.com/builder
Please note that the content of this particular archive is not relevant because no "module" have been added to it, but you'll understand that in a minute.
If you add a ?print parameter, it will display the content of the archive without downloading it:
http://www.initializr.com/builder?print
Initializr uses "modules", which are code snippets or files (or both) that will be included in the archive.
The modernizr module, for instance, adds the following line in index.html:
<script src="js/libs/modernizr-2.0.min.js"></script>
and also adds modernizr-2.0.min.js in the js/libs directory.
If you want to add a module to your archive, just add the name of that module as a GET parameter:
http://www.initializr.com/builder?print&jquery&modernizr
All the current available modules can be found on this Github.
Let's take a look at what contains modules/modernizr on the Git repo:
modernizr-2.0.min.js- It's the actual Modernizr JS file,modernizr.html- It's the file containing the HTML JavaScript code inclusion,modernizr.json- Here is the interesting stuff! Let's take a closer look at this file:
{
"author" : "Paul Irish",
"name" : "Modernizr",
"id" : "modernizr",
"inserts" :
[
{
"what" : "modernizr.html",
"where" : "index.html/head/html5polyfill"
}
,
{
"what" : "modernizr-2.0.min.js",
"where" : "js/libs/modernizr-2.0.min.js",
"type" : "file"
}
],
"incompatibilities" : ["html5shiv"]
}
We can see that a module configuration file is actually a simple JSON containing the following members:
author: The name of the author of the module,name: The "Fancy name" of the module,id: The unique id of the module (prefixed with h5bp- or izr- if it's from HTML5 Boilerplate or Initializr),incompatibilities: An array of modules ids that can't be used with this one.inserts: An array of insertions of code snippets or files with the following fields:what: What code snippet or file is going to be included in the archive (refers to an other file of the same module folder),where: In which file and place the code snippet will be injected (in these files), or the name of the file if it's an entire file,type: (optional) specifyfilefor this field if the current insertion is an entire file (like modernizr JS file).
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