lingon

lingon

Lingon is a single-page application dev tool with a focus on developer happiness.

Overview

Lingon is a build tool that favors convention over configuration. By employing a similar file structure across your projects you can minimize the amount of build configuration you need to write and maintain. We've borrowed this idea from middleman and Sprockets. If you already know these tools you'll feel right at home with Lingon.

Lingon allows you to enjoy the productive workflows from Middleman while leveraging an existing community of great gulp.js plugins.

Features

• A convention layer on top of Gulp.js.
• Sprockets-like "include" directive for file concatenation
• Uses Gulp plugins as Sprockets-like file processors
• Built in development server.
• Out-of-the box support for Less, EJS & Markdown

Install

Add "lingon" to your package.json or:

$ npm install lingon

Prepare your project

Create a "lingon.js" file in the root of the project and make it executable:

$ chmod +x lingon.js

This file is used to both configure and run Lingon. This is where you define which plugins to use and how they should interact. The most basic valid "lingon.js" file looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/env node
var lingon = require("lingon");

This will allow Lingon to build and serve a basic web applications. By default, Lingon will look for source files in ./source and put build files in ./build. These defaults can be changed like this:

#!/usr/bin/env node
var lingon = require("lingon");

lingon.config.sourcePath = "/some/other/path";
lingon.config.buildPath = "/dev/null";

Check out the usage documentation for a walkthrough of all features.

Run Lingon

Show help:

$ ./lingon.js -h

Build once and quit:

$ ./lingon.js build

Clean and build:

$ ./lingon.js clean build

Start the server:

$ ./lingon.js

Start the server on a custom port:

$ ./lingon.js server -p 1111

Documentation

Usage examples

Project templates

Angular.js application

How does it relate to Make, Gulp, Grunt, X?

Lingon favors convention over configuration. For example, Grunt & Gulp provide powerful API's for building very customized build scripts. This requires you to write a bit of code everytime you want your build system to do something new. Each step in the build pipeline is carefully orchestrated so every project becomes special. This means there's a lot of copy-pasta going on when starting something new.

Lingon is inspired by Sprockets and uses a convention approach: A set of simple rules are used to determine what files to build, how to build them and where to put them. Files are processed based on their filename extensions.

Example: "index.html.ejs" will be run through the EJS processor. These processors are gulp plugins, which allows us to leverage a large collection of great existing plugins. If you want to teach Lingon something new, you just have to define the mapping between a file ending and a gulp plugin. That's it!

Test it

Run the bats e2e tests:

$ ./tests.sh

Contributions

We'd love some help!
Take a look at our CONTRIBUTING.md file for guidelines.

License

Licensed under the MIT license.

Changelog

Version 2.0.0

• Feature: Add option to specify a namespace in server mode
• Feature: Add option to specify a directory index in server mode
• Feature: Add unit test framework tape and restructure test folders
• Refactor: Removed the processorStream built in file cache and fixed bugs in the directiveStream.
• Refactor: Rewrote the build logic as a pipeline of pluggable functions
• API change: Moved all configuration to lingon.config
• API change: Refactor processors (ProcessorStore) with a simplified API syntax
• API change: Files are no longer written to disk when in server mode. Only the build task will write files to disk.