Front-End Tooling with Gulp, Bower, and Yeoman

by Stefan Baumgartner

Overview

Summary

Front-End Tooling with Gulp, Bower, and Yeoman teaches you how to use and combine these popular tools to set up a customized development workflow from start to finish.

Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications.

About the Technology

In large web dev projects, productivity is all about workflow. Great workflow requires tools like Gulp, Bower, and Yeoman that can help you automate the design-build-deploy pipeline. Together, the Yeoman scaffolding tool, Bower dependency manager, and Gulp automation build system radically shorten the time it takes to release web applications.

About the Book

Front-End Tooling with Gulp, Bower, and Yeoman teaches you how to set up an automated development workflow. You'll start by understanding the big picture of the development process. Then, using patterns and examples, this in-depth book guides you through building a product delivery pipeline using Gulp, Bower, and Yeoman. When you're done, you'll have an intimate understanding of the web development process and the skills you need to create a powerful, customized workflow using these best-of-breed tools.

What's Inside

• Mastering web dev workflow patterns
• Automating the product delivery pipeline
• Creating custom workflows

About the Reader

This book is suitable for front-end developers with JavaScript experience.

About the Author

Stefan Baumgartner has led front-end teams working across a wide range of development styles and application domains.

Table of Contents
PART 1 - A MODERN WORKFLOW FOR WEB APPLICATIONS

1. Tooling in a modern front-end workflow
2. Getting started with Gulp
3. A Gulp setup for local development
4. Dependency management with Bower
5. Scaffolding with Yeoman
PART 2 - INTEGRATING AND EXTENDING THE PLATFORM
6. Gulp for different environments
7. Working with streams
8. Extending Gulp
9. Creating modules and Bower components
10. Advanced Yeoman generators

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781638353751
Publisher:	Manning
Publication date:	11/23/2016
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	240
File size:	8 MB

About the Author

Stefan Baumgartner has led front-end teams working across a wide range of development styles and application domains.
Stefan Baumgartner has led front-end teams working across a wide range of development styles and application domains.

Table of Contents

Preface xi

Acknowledgments xiii

About this book xv

About the author xix

About the cover illustration xx

Part 1 A Modern Workflow for Web Applications 1

1 Tooling in a modern front-end workflow 2

1.1 A software developer's workflow and task list 3

Initialization phase tasks 4

Development phase tasks 6

Deployment phase tasks 6

The human factor 7

1.2 JavaScript tools and a new workflow 8

Three types of code and their tools 8

Node.js for JavaScript tools 11

1.3 Scaffolding with Yeoman 13

The benefits of a Yeoman as a scaffolding tool 14

The concept behind generators 14

1.4 Dependency management with Bower 15

The benefits of Bower 15

Bower's dependency tree 17

1.5 Gulp: the streaming build system 18

The benefits of Gulp 19

Build pipelines 19

1.6 Summary 21

2 Getting started with Gulp 22

2.1 Setting up Gulp 23

The building blocks of Gulp 23

The Gulp command-line interface 25

The local Gulp installation 26

2.2 Creating Gulpfiles 28

A Gulp "Hello World" task 28

Dealing with streams 31

Readable and writeable streams with Gulp 32

2.3 Handling tasks with Gulp plugins 34

Transforming data 34

Changing the file structure 36

Chaining plugins 37

2.4 Summary 40

3 A Gulp setup for local development 41

3.1 The local development environment 42

Grouping the tasks 43

The reset step: a dean task 44

Build and iteration 45

3.2 The initial build step 45

Dependency and execution chains 46

Serial and parallel task execution 47

Task execution functions for dependency chains 49

Updates to war Gulp file 51

3.3 The iteration step 53

Watch processes 53

Using Browsersync for an on-demand server with live reload 55

Updates to your Gulp file 58

3.4 Summary 59

4 Dependency management with Bower 61

4.1 Dependency management basics 63

Components and dependencies 63

Dependency trees 64

4.2 Flat dependency tree management with Bower 67

Installation and update of a component 67

Installation of components with dependencies 69

Resolving dependency conflicts 70

4.3 Integration with Gulp 72

Wiring up dependencies to your application files with Gulp 73

Including dependencies in our build chain with Gulp 75

4.4 Summary 77

5 Scaffolding with Yeoman 78

5.1 Yeoman generators 80

Parts of a generator 81

Calling generators 83

5.2 Project templates 85

Fixed parts 85

Flexible parts 87

Optional parts 87

Restorable parts 88

5.3 Yeoman's assembly line 88

Prompting 89

Writing 91

Installing 93

5.4 Creating a generator 94

Preparing the project template 94

Providing the assembly instructions 96

Bundling and testing 97

5.5 Summary 98

Part 2 Integrating and Extending the Platform 99

6 Gulp for different environments 101

6.1 Incremental builds and build caches 103

Gulp's built-in functionality 104

Installing a build cache 105

Handling file deletions 108

6.2 Debugging original tiles through sourcemaps 110

What are sourcemaps? 110

Built-in sourcemaps in Gulp 113

The source-maps plugin 114

6.3 Environment-specific switches 116

The noop() task 116

Dev() and prod() selection functions 118

Parsing command-line arguments 120

6.4 Summary 121

7 Working with streams 122

7.1 Handling different input types 124

Passthrough streams 124

Merge streams 125

7.2 Handling variations in output 127

Parameterized streams on a task level 128

Stream arrays 130

7.3 Additional streaming techniques 133

Avoiding repetition with stream snippets 134

Handling flow with stream, queues 135

Changing stream contents with Gulp filters 136

7.4 Summary 137

8 Extending Gulp 139

8.1 The Gulp plugin blacklist 140

Verdict: not a Gulp plugin 141

Verdict: use something else instead 142

Verdict: dues too much 143

8.2 Integrating other stream-based tools 144

Streams, buffers, and Vinyl file objects 144

Integrating Browserify 146

Transforming contents 149

8.3 Integrate Promise-based tools 151

How Promises work 151

Promises in the Gulp task system 154

8.4 Summary 156

9 Creating modules and Bower components 158

9.1 Asynchronous module definition 159

AMD-module definitions for the browser 161

Refactoring to AMD 163

9.2 CommonJS and Universal Module Definition 165

CommonJS modules 166 ¦ Universal Module Definition 166

9.3 Defining and deploying Bower components 169

Bower.json specification 169

Deploying and registering components 171

Private registries and components 172

9.4 Summary 175

10 Advanced Yeoman generators 177

10.1 Adding new files to existing projects 178

The concept of sub-generators 178

Assembly-instructions for a sub-generator 180

10.2 Improving the interface 183

Editing existing files 183

Dealing with user configurations 184

10.3 Composing generators 187

Generator composition with global generators 187

Generator composition with dependencies 190

10.4 Summary 192

Appendix: Introduction to Node.js 193

Index 211