frontizer

Frontizer

Node.js based tool for effective frontend development.

Includes stylus, browserify, es6, jade for now. Fututre builds will allow you to choose your own build stack.

Usage

First install this module:

npm i -g frontizer

Create a folder for your new project and enter it.

Initialize your new project with frontizer init than run it with frontizer start.

Just type frontizer to see all available commands and their arguments.

Assets

Assets folder contains all statics and source files for your project. Main files are used as a starting points for compiling, browserifying and publishing. Published files are placed inside assets/compiled directory.

Client JavaScript and ECMAScript 6

Either ordinary JavaScript or ECMAScript 6 can be used simultaneously. All files with .es6 extension will be precompiled by Babel.

Views

Views folder contains your templates. Each file here represents it's own route which is the same as a file name. The one exception is home.jade which represents a home page.

View based routing examples:

• home.js - /
• foo/bar.jade - /foo/bar
• foo/home.jade - /foo

Predefined variables

• __css contains ready to use tags with compiled css links
• __js same for JavaScript
• __livereload contains link to a JavaScript file necessary for livereloading

Helper functions

• range([from], to) - generates an array of numbers from first parameter to second; first parameter can be omitted so it will be equal to 1 by default. Examples:
  • range(3, 5) -> [3, 4, 5]
  • range(5) -> [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]
• static('file-name') - prepends static assets root to the file name
  • static('example.jpg') -> '/assets/static/example.jpg'
• linkTo('view-name') - returns a proper link to the view (there are different for static build and application)
  • linkTo('home') -> '/', static builds: 'home.html'
  • linkTo('my/page') -> '/my/page', static builds: 'my.page.html'

Data

You can provide any data to your views by creating data files. They will be fetched in the same way as view. exports object fields will be variables in views.

Data shared with corresponding view also includes data from upper levels home files. For example, route /foo/bar will uses views/foo/bar.jade view and tries to fetch and merge files:

1. data/home.js
2. data/foo.js
3. data/foo/bar.js

Obviously, data/home.js file will be fetched on every route so you can use it to provide global data and defaults.

Any duplicated data field names will be overwritten by lower level data.

NPM modules

• Request handling: Express
• Templating: Jade
• Styles: Stylus with kouto-swiss
• Client JavaScript: Browserify, Watchify, Babelify with ES2015 preset
• Utility: Livereload, Serve-favicon, jstransformer-stylus, ncp