Makefile for the Front End

I've used this Makefile for a fast development environment for a side-project that I no longer continue.

You can clone this repository to kickstart a frontend project. Required folder structure is set up for Makefile to work.

TL;DR

Use static, non-preprocessed CSS with livereload to give lightning-fast prototyping abilities.
Use watchify + babelify to compile JSX and enable ES2015. Also auto-refresh the browser.
Minify HTML (html-minifier), CSS (cssnano), JS (uglifyjs) for production.
Use PostCSS plugins (import, autoprefixer) for production CSS.

Why Make?

I'm using Make to manage ops-side of my front-end projects because it's simple. In Gulp, Grunt or Webpack or any other tool, you have to comprehend the complexity of programmatic usage and learn how some 3rd party abstractions work.

When, instead, Make is used for the same tasks, it's much easier for anyone to contribute, fix or make any kind of change on the build script (at least for me). It's not asynchronous, it doesn't give you abstractions to "make your job easier". It's flat. You read a Makefile in sequential order, with no indirection.

Setup

You need Node and npm installed on your machine which is capable of running Makefiles (i.e: not Windows as far as I know).

# Clone the repository
git clone [email protected]:scriptype/Makefile-for-the-Front-End.git

# Go to project directory
cd Makefile-for-the-Front-End

# Install dependencies
npm i

Besides modules used in Makefile, react and react-dom for JS and express for dev-server will also be installed. They are not mandatory.

Run

Development

make

# in a separate session:
node server dev

When finished, head over to localhost:8989/dist

Production

make release

# in a separate session:
node server prod

When finished, head over to localhost:8989

Notes

It's far from being perfect (and it's not intended to be).
Express dependency is for server.js. You can remove it and handle dev-server however you like. env.js is also used only in server.js
Handlebars is used in index.html to dynamically manipulate the path of JS and CSS files according to environment. It also calls livereload script in dev mode.
No CSS pre-processor was used. CSS files are completely static and source files are directly used in dev mode. You get an experience similar to prototyping in browser thanks to livereload.
As src/style.css is used during development, your dev server should serve root directory of project instead of only /dist. Yet since index.html is still in /dist, in order to view the page in browser, you should type localhost:port/dist in address bar. This is not a problem after release.
When releasing the project:
- CSS will be autoprefixed and @imports will be concatenated into a single file.
- JS modules will be babelified with react and es2015 presets.
- HTML, JS and CSS outputs will be minified.

Contribution

Please don't hesitate to open issues and making pull requests. When doing that, consider this boilerplate is aimed to have minimum complexity. e.g: Implementing redux is out of scope of this project.

Licence

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2016 Mustafa Enes Ertarhanacı

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, 
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.

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