gulp-appx

Build system for Windows 10 App Demos

Starter Gulp + Browserify project + Appx Tools

Includes the following tools, tasks, and workflows:

• Browserify (with browserify-shim)
• Windows 10 Hosted App Build System
• Watchify (caching version of browserify for super fast rebuilds)
• SASS (super fast libsass with source maps, and autoprefixer)
• BrowserSync for live reloading and a static server
• Image optimization
• Error handling in the console and in Notification Center
• Shimming non common-js vendor code with other dependencies (like a jQuery plugin)
• Multiple bundles with shared dependencies
• Separate compression task for production builds

Install npm dependencies

npm install

This runs through all dependencies listed in package.json and downloads them to a node_modules folder in your project directory.

The gulp command

You can install gulp globally with npm install -g gulp, which will add the gulp script to your global bin folder.

To use the version that's specified in your project's package.json. You can simply alias ./node_modules/.bin/gulp to gulp. Open up ~/.zshrc or ~./bashrc and add the following line:

alias gulp='node_modules/.bin/gulp'

Now, running gulp in the project directory will use the version specified and installed from the package.json file.

Run gulp

gulp

This will run the default gulp task defined in gulp/tasks/default.js, which has the following task dependencies: ['sass', 'images', 'markup', 'watch']

• The sass task compiles your css files.
• images moves images copies images from a source folder, performs optimizations, the outputs them into the build folder
• markup doesn't do anything but copy an html file over from src to build, but here is where you could do additional templating work.
• watch has watchify as a dependency, which will run the browserifyTask with a devMode flag that enables sourcemaps and watchify, a browserify add-on that enables caching for super fast recompiling. The task itself starts watching source files and will re-run the appropriate tasks when those files change.

gulp appx

This command will install your App as a hosted app pointing to http://localhost:3000 and then launch it.

gulp production

There is also a production task you can run with gulp production, which will re-build optimized, compressed css and js files to the build folder, as well as output their file sizes to the console. It's a shortcut for running the following tasks: ['images', 'minifyCss', 'uglifyJs'].

Configuration

All paths and plugin settings have been abstracted into a centralized config object in gulp/config.js. Adapt the paths and settings to the structure and needs of your project.