apostrophe-browserify

DEPRECATED

This module is for Apostrophe 0.5 only, not the 2.x stable release.

Even with 0.5, it requires the server to run browserify and babel, which slows things down needlessly. Just create your own gulp workflow in development which generates an output file that is pushed as an asset to Apostrophe in the usual way.

Apostrophe Browserify

This Apostrophe 2 module enables you to bundle your frontend code using browserify while taking advantage of automatic minification and Apostrophe's asset pipeline.

When using the development option watchify will run, recompiling your assets any time they are saved.

Installation

To use it, run npm install apostrophe-browserify --save and add it to your app.js configuration:

{
  ...

  'apostrophe-browserify': {
    // files are specified relative to the project directory (app.js)
    files: [ './public/js/modules/_site.js' ]
  }

  ...
}

Configuration

Apostrophe will save your bundled file to the public/js/ directory. By default it creates _site-compiled.js, however the filename can be configured using the outputFile option.

You specify your input files using the files option. You may specify more than one. Your input files may use the require statement, much as they can in node apps, as described in the browserify documentation.

{
  'apostrophe-browserify': {
    // The files to compile. All files in the array are
    // compiled to a single output file.
    files: [ './public/js/modules/_site.js' ],

    // The filename of your bundled file.
    // Defaults to '_site-compiled.js'.
    outputFile: '_site-compiled.js',

    // When this is true `watchify` will recompile your
    // assets any time they are saved. Defaults to `false`.
    development: false,

    // When this is true and `development` is also true
    // watchify will log a message in the console each
    // time your bundle is recompiled. Defaults to `true`.
    verbose: true,

    // When this is true and `development` is also true
    // your operating system will generate a notification
    // when watchify's build fails. Defaults to `false`.
    notifications: false,

    // When this is true, browserify will run a simple babel
    // transform on your files using the es2015 preset. You // can read about what is included with that here:
    // http://babeljs.io/docs/plugins/preset-es2015/
    es2015: true,

    // When this option is true, you are able to write JSX
    // React within your browserify-compiled files through
    // the reactify transform.
    react: true,

    // When this option is true, you are able to use a small
    // subset of node's fs module: readFileSync, readFile,
    // readdirSync, and readdir.
    // https://github.com/substack/brfs
    brfs: true,

    // Pass additional options into browserify if
    // necessary. Overrides any module-level options.
    browserifyOptions: {

    }
  }
}

For production use

1. Make sure you add public/js/_site-compiled.js to your .gitignore and deployment/rsync_exclude.txt files.

2. When minify is true, which it should be for all production Apostrophe sites, the output file will not be recompiled, even on startup, unless it does not exist yet. Together with the apostrophe:generation task, this prevents race conditions in a multicore Apostrophe production environment.

Changelog

0.5.8: added native notifications when build fails, improved error logging. Updated styling of console logs to be a little clearer.

0.5.6: added source mapping and timestamp logging on recompile when in development mode.

0.5.5: no need to manually add the output file to your assets. Behaves properly in a multicore environment as long as minify is true. Documentation updated. The basedir option has been removed, as this module is currently only intended for project-level code, but more thought will be given to how this module could be used in conjunction with module-level code in the future.