build-workflow

Build Workflow

Simple helper to create build workflows, using grunt, that are both easy to use and maintain.

Overview

This is a small module that aims to simplify the creation of workflows based on grunt. In order to achieve this some conventions are followed, i.e. do not use a gigantic Gruntfile.js that is soon harder to maintain, preventing a lot of spaghetti code by breaking it into different modules, one per each grunt task config, keeping things small and focused.

This module is inspired by this blog post supercharging your gruntfile

The main differences are:

• config files always export a function that return an object. All the config exported functions receive the grunt object, the pkg, package.json parsed object, and an options object, which has some helpers that will be described later.
• Custom grunt tasks can be placed inside the grunt-deps/tasks folder they will be loaded automatically.
• It does not use yaml, so the aliases for tasks are defined in javascript. This is to keep it simple and avoid leaving the javascript realm.
• provide some base common tasks configs, described in the next section.

So, This module will

• help you break your gigantic grunt file into small modules that are easy to reason about.
• provide some (optional) base tasks and tasks configurations like:
  • changelog: Create a changelog from the git log info. For more info check the changelog section.
  • check-valid: Beautify (with esbeautifier) and validate the javascript files with eslint and jscs.
  • install-hooks: Install commit-msg and prepush hooks for git. To enforce the rules for commit messages and to verify all files configured to be beautified and validated are checked before pushing.
  • prepush: the tasks that the prepush hook runs before any push is made.
  • i18n-from-yml: Generate i18n.{lang}.js files from yml translations files. (this is actually done using grunt-ez-frontend)
  • i18n-to-ez-frontend: create an ez-frontend task for each i18n.{lang}.js file to make each of them be minified, had the right version and include the banner header.
  • run-i18n-targets: execute all the ez-frontend targets created by the previous task.
  • css-font: a custom task to create the css and less mixins for a font from the selection.json file obtained from the icomoon app
  • target, js-target, css-target: tasks to run ez-frontend targets.
  • validate-files: a custom task to validate files passed as parameters. Useful to beautify the code from within an IDE.
  • twig: a simple twig template renderer

TODO: at some point all this tasks should be moved to their own repos in order to leave build-workflow a simple grunt management module

Update: While grunt is a nice task runner, I lately found myself using it not that much. Lately I tried to make most of the tasks found inside this module separated packages that can be used from within the command line. This new approach has several new advantages, and modules can be used from any task runner.

TODO: List which modules should be used instead of the ones provided by this package.

Usage

For usage info please read this document

Grunt configs/tasks provided by this package

For info about the common configs and tasks please check this document

Changelog

Read it here

Changelog

v2.0.8

check-valid tasks

• Enhancements

  • Honor the --skip-cache flag and provide consistent output - 58d33f9, royriojas, 26/03/2015 00:59:11

    Running the tasks with

    grunt check-valid --skip-cache=true
    

    Will now delete the cache files. Subsequent calls to this task without that flag will use a new cache file. This is useful when a configuration file has changed and we want to destroy the cache that was created when using the previous configuration, since the files didn't change, the tasks would assume they are OK.

    TODO: Store the configuration as well as part of the cache, that way if the config change the task will destroy the cache automatically and create a new one for the next executions without actually having to use the --skip-cache flag. Fix <a target="_blank" class="info-link" href="https://github.com/royriojas/build-workflow/issues/5"><span>#5</span></a>

    Also in this commit. Normalized the output of the checkvalid tasks. Fix <a target="_blank" class="info-link" href="https://github.com/royriojas/build-workflow/issues/6"><span>#6</span></a>