This is a boilerplate to ease builds of web projects utilising good build tools and related utilities, such as Grunt, RequireJS, LESS and Karma.
Unlike Yeoman & other tools, this is a pure Grunt script with full transparency on how the build is handled; there is no magic.
If you don't already have node.js 0.8.x or later, fetch it from nodejs.org. In addition we need a few dependencies you may have.
> npm install -g bower grunt-cli
Installing the project itself is easy. Both build system dependencies and app dependencies are triggered by
> npm install
It actually performs a release build, too (to verify that everything is ok).
To trigger debug build
> grunt debug
To trigger debug build and watch for changes
> grunt debug watch
To trigger release build
> grunt release
Most likely the normal grunt server will fail (yet there is no big reason why it should). The system comes with bundled node/express stack, because that is likely you would use for development use, anyway. Start the server in debug mode by
> npm start
Note that if you have run grunt debug in another window, it should be rebuilding your changed pages in the background.
To test the service in release mode, use
> grunt release
> NODE_ENV=production node server/server.js
You most likely want to re-run the tests and reload the files automatically. Start the debug server elsewhere, then run
> grunt monitor
And the build will start to watch the changes in your project, triggering reload when needed.
src/ The client-side source code
src/index.html The HTML entry point, stub page
src/app Application source code
src/app/main.js The app JS entry point
src/components The 3rd party JS dependencies
src/css The CSS templates
grunt.js The Grunt build configuration
components.json The Bower components
.bowerrc The Bower directory overrides
package.json The build level dependencies
server/server.js The stub static file server
server/package.json The server specific dependencies
staging/ Results of the build step
dist/ Minified & optimised version
Upgrading the boilerplate in your project may be tedious work. Once BoReLESS directory structure becomes stable (it might be already, but no guarantees!), you can use it directly as an upstream (here with a name 'boreless').
> git remote add -f boreless [email protected]:SC5/grunt-boreless-boilerplate.git
Now synchronizing with BoReLESS becomes easier:
> git pull boreless master
It is possible to use BoReLESS as a subtree, too:
> git subtree add --prefix client --squash [email protected]:SC5/grunt-boreless-boilerplate.git master --squash
> git remote add -f boreless [email protected]:SC5/grunt-boreless-boilerplate.git
> git fetch boreless master
The example pulls BoReLESS master branch into 'client' subdirectory. The key here is to use '--prefix client' to keep the boilerplate in its own subdirectory. Later on, sync by:
> git subtree pull --prefix client boreless master
- Use some sensible app boilerplate (or fetch it from another project)
- Add Cordova builds (or put it its own branch or an example)
- Add templating language compilation into JS RequireJS modules
- Add some examples & documentation
- 2013/01/16 - v0.1.0 - Initial release
- 2013/03/10 - v0.2.0 - Update to Grunt 0.4.0
- 2013/10/12 - v0.3.0 - Add Karma based test automation
Copyright (c) 2013 SC5, licensed for users and contributors under MIT license. https://github.com/sc5/grunt-boreless-boilerplate/blob/master/LICENSE-MIT