Building and Releasing Your Skin

So far, you’ve worked on the “source version” of your skin. Now that your skin is perfect as you wanted, it is time to prepare it to be used in production websites.

To do so you’ll need CKBuilder a Java application that makes this magic happen. It can be downloaded here: http://download.cksource.com/CKBuilder/.

Java must be available on your command line. To run the builder, simply copy ckbuilder.jar into the skins folder of CKEditor 4 (where your skin custom folder is available) and execute this command:

> java -jar ckbuilder.jar --build-skin myskin myskin-release

The myskin and myskin-release parts are your skin folder name and the destination folder name. Just use the names you prefer.

This is the job done by CKBuilder on your skin:

• Merges all CSS files parts. This means that all CSS files having @import entries will have their imported files in-lined, having just one file available.
• Minifies CSS and JavaScript files, reducing their size to optimize the download speed.
• Generates a single “strip image” containing all icons provided by the skin.
• Removes all unnecessary files.

You skin is ready. The release version is the one to use on your websites or to distribute to others, while the source version can be shared to the world through services like GitHub.