Speeding up nanoc compiles

Although nanoc’s great, when you have a bunch of gems all doing their thing and you’re just trying to fix a CSS bug or tweak some markup the compile times can be unmanageable.

This may seem like a no-brainer, but a simple trick for this is to use conditionals in your Rules file tied to an environment variable. Something like this works a treat:

if ENV['NANOC_ENV'] == 'production'
  filter :colorize_syntax, :default_colorizer => :pygmentize
end

For normal development, just continue to run nanoc compile and those slow filters will be ignored (seriously, pygmentize is great but it’s unbelievably slow for me). When you’re ready to see what it looks like for real, run NANOC_ENV=production nanoc compile and wait it out.