How to create custom Highcharts files

by Jon Arild Nygård

By using the Highcharts assembler you can create your own custom Highcharts files. A benefit of using a custom file can be optimization of browser load speed due to lower filesize and less files to request.
Follow the steps below to get started.

Install the Highcharts assembler

Download with NPM

This project is not published as a package in the NPM register, but NPM has support for installing packages by cloning them from GitHub which is something we can utilize.

The command we will use is npm install <githubname>/<githubrepo>[#<commit-ish>].

The command has support for providing a #<commit-ish> which can be a tag or reference to a specific commit. Using the #<commit-ish> is useful to ensure that everyone working on your project is using the same version of the assembler. This is the recommended approach. The following example installs a version of the assembler tagged as v1.0.10:

npm install --save-dev highcharts/highcharts-assembler#v1.0.10

If versioning is not a concern, then it is possible to install the latest commit from master branch by omitting the #<commit-ish>:

npm install --save-dev highcharts/highcharts-assembler

Read more about npm install on npmjs.com.

After installing the package by using NPM it can be loaded as a regular package in NodeJS.

const build = require('highcharts-assembler');

Download ZIP archive from GitHub

Go to the highcharts/highcharts-assembler repository and click on “Clone or download” and select “Download ZIP”. Once the zip file is downloaded unpack it to a desired location.

Open the extracted folder in a CLI and run npm install to install any required dependencies.

After downloading and extracting the archive, it can be loaded in NodeJS by referring to its location. The example below has installed the assembler in a subfolder named highcharts-assembler:

const build = require('./highcharts-assembler/index.js');

Download the Highcharts parts files

Download from GitHub

Go to the highcharts/highcharts repository and click on “Clone or download” and select “Download ZIP”. Once the zip file is downloaded unpack it to a desired location. In this case we are only interested in the folders js and css where the source code is located, the rest can be deleted if wanted.

Create a custom master file

Start by creating a new file ./highcharts/js/masters/custom.src.js. In this example we want a basic line chart with some interactivity. To achieve this we will need a setup that looks something like this:

'use strict';
import Highcharts from '../parts/Globals.js';
import '../parts/SvgRenderer.js';
import '../parts/Chart.js';
import '../parts/Series.js';
import '../parts/Interaction.js';
export default Highcharts;

Modify the setup according to your needs, then proceed with the next step.

Configure and run the Highcharts assembler

Create a new file ./custom-builder.js. Add the following configuration to the file:

'use strict';
/**
 * Assembler is installed as an NPM package.
 * See "Install the Highcharts assembler" for more information.
 */
const build = require('highcharts-assembler');
build({
    base: './highcharts/js/masters/',
    files: ['custom.src.js'],
    output: './dist/'
});

Open a CLI in your project folder and run node custom-builder.js to execute the build script. Once the script has completed you should find the resulting script ./dist/custom.src.js.

Create custom Highcharts Styled files

To create a custom Styled version you will have to make a few modifications to the build procedure. This example assumes that you have read and followed the procedures already mentioned above in this article.
The Highcharts assembler has an option named type, let us set this to css. The configuration in ./custom-builder.js should now look like this:

build({
    base: './highcharts/js/masters/',
    files: ['custom.src.js'],
    output: './dist/',
    type : 'css'
});

Run node custom-builder.js again and notice that the new file ./dist/js/custom.src.js has been created.

Highcharts Styled version uses CSS to style the chart, and we must therefore also load its css styling. In this example we will use node-sass to generate the css file from the highcharts.scss file.
First create a new directory ./dist/css.
Add the following code to ./custom-builder.js:

const sass = require('node-sass');
const fs = require('fs');
sass.render({
  file: './highcharts/css/highcharts.scss'
}, (err, result) => {
    fs.writeFile('./dist/css/highcharts.css', result.css);
});

Then run node custom-builder.js again to create all the files for your custom Highcharts Styled version.

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