Front-End Task

Automation

Friday, 25 October 13

with Grunt,Bower,Yeoman and

NPM

Agenda

Overview: - What is automation - Reasons of automation - Old ways of workflow - Automation systems available

Demonstration of NPM, Grunt, Yeoman and Bower:

Application to Learning Management System:

What is automation? - The term automation, inspired by the earlier wordAutomatic (coming from automaton), was not widely usedbefore 1947, when General Motors established the automation department.[1] It was during this time that industry was rapidlyadopting feedback controllers, which were introduced in the 1930s.

- The technique, method, or system of operating or controlling a process by highly automatic means, as by electronic devices, reducing human intervention to a minimum.

- Simply make the system work automatically.

Reasons of automation? - Increase effectiveness, efficiency and coverage. - Decrease monotonous process which can lead to unexpected mistake. - Time saving translates to cost savings - Because developers are LAZY, and we’d rather play pool while running the automation….

Old ways of workflow - Scaffolding - Convert PSD to sprite Gifs, Pngs or Jpgs - Create index.html - Download external vendors e.g jQuery, jQuery ui, angularJS, Bootstrap - Reference the vendors inside the “href” - Open browser, test and do tweaks and reload browser

It would be +1 if the dev is doing some compression or minify on CSS, Javascript or assets with YUI Compressor or UglifyJS.

http://yui.github.io/yuicompressor/

time spent

task size

non-geek

geek

does it manually

makes fun of geek’s

loses

gets annoyed

writes script to automate wi

ns

Automation systems

available - Java ANT - BASH - RPM - Maven - Make

#!/bin/bash

# ALWAYS OVERWRITE MOST RECENTcat js/app.js > js/site.js

# PLUGINScat js/jQuery.js >> js/site.jscat js/someMinifiedPlugin.js >> js/site.js

$ ./pack.sh

http://mechanics.flite.com/blog/2012/06/19/why-we-use-node-dot-js-and-grunt-to-build-javascript/

Not all developer can write

bash

New workflow for lazy

developers

Is a package manager that installs, publishes and manages node programs written in javascript and runs under Node.js platform.

Download and install Node.js from http://nodejs.org

Usage

$ npm init

$ npm info bower

$ npm install –g bower

$ npm install bower –save-dev

$ npm update

package.json

YeomanModern workflow for modern web

apps

Whats up Yo?

http://yeoman.io/whyyeoman.html

Yo scaffolds out a new application, from bootstraping grunt configuration and tasks, installs basic bower components and CSS

Features:

- Fast scaffolding - Generators for BackboneJS, EmberJS and AngularJS - Automatically compiles Coffeescripts & Compass - Killer package management using Bower - Run’s headless browser unit testing using PhantomJS

Installing Yo and generators

$ npm install –g yo

$ npm install –g generator-angular

$ npm install –g generator-webapp

$ yo webapp

$ yo angular

GRUNTThe JavaScript Task Runner

Grunt is a way to automate operations and to performing repetitive tasks. Once you have done the configuration the less work you have to do when doing minification, compilation, deployment, unit testing, image optimisation and etc.

Task Runner

Features:

- Unit Testing - Cache busting with revisions - CSS Compressor - JS Linting - Concatenation - Watch files for live reload - Uglify - Set up proxy server - Image Optimisation - Execute linux command - A lot more…..

Installing Grunt

$ npm install grunt –save-dev

$ npm install grunt-cli –save-dev

Gruntfile.json

module.exports = function(grunt) { grunt.initConfig({ uglify: { dist: { src: 'dist/myfile.js', dest: 'dist/myfile.min.js' } } }); grunt.loadNpmTasks('grunt-contrib-uglify'); grunt.registerTask('default', ['uglify']);};

Sample minify with Grunt

$ grunt mytask will run all the targets of mytask

$ grunt mytask:target will run the specific target of mytask

$ grunt clean $ grunt sass:dev

Executing Builds

- Bower is a package manager for the web. - Reads from a bower.json file- Handles dependencies!

Installation

$ sudo npm install -g bower$ bower init$ bower list$ bower search$ bower install bootstrap –save

Bower

Bower.json

{ "dependencies": { "bootstrap": "~3.0.2" }}Composer does 2 things:1) Downloads libraries and their dependencies.2) Sets up autoloading so you don’t need “require” statements

Bower only does number 1.

Thanks!Q uestions?