Welcome to icyeye’s documentation!

Overview

icyeye provides functionality for parsing CSS files (or any other file with style related information) to detect image declaration and encode these images into a copy of the original file.

This process cuts down on the HTTP overhead of having many small image files being requested from a CSS file by sending the data in one go.

Installing

icyeye can be installed with easy_install:

$ easy_install icyeye

or pip:

$ pip install icyeye

If you don’t have access to easy_install or pip then you can run the setup.py script. To get a code checkout from the git repo, do:

$ git clone git://github.com/euangoddard/icyeye.git

Then you can run setup.py:

$ python setup.py install

Note

If you are installing system wide you will need to do this as root.

Building this documentation

This documentation can be built using Sphinx. Get a copy of Sphinx on your make and then in the docs directory, do:

$ make html

Usage overview

After installing icyeye you can either use it in a python project of your own, via the interactive python interpreter, or via the command line interface (CLI).

To invoke a conversion via the CLI do, e.g., the following:

$ icyeye ~/dev/web/project/main.css /main.css /tmp/inline-images.css

For more advanced usage, see the Narrative documentation.

Dependencies and python version

icyeye has no external dependencies as all functionality utilizes functionality from the python standard library.

icyeye was written using python 2.5 and should be forward compatible to version 2.7. It relies on functools.partial(). The functools was introduced in python 2.5, although there is a backport for python 2.4 available on pypi.