BoReLESS - Grunt Bower + RequireJS + LESS Boilerplate

This is a boilerplate to ease builds of web projects utilising RequireJS, having several JS library dependencies. Unlike Yeoman & other tools, this is a pure Grunt script with full transparency on how the build is handled; there is no magic.

Installation

If you don't already have node.js 0.8.x or later, fetch it from nodejs.org. In addition we need a few dependencies you may have.

> npm install -g bower grunt-cli

Installing the project itself is easy. Both build system dependencies and app dependencies are triggered by

> npm install

It actually performs a release build, too (to verify that everything is ok).

Building

To trigger debug build

> grunt debug

To trigger release build

> grunt release

Running the Service

Most likely the normal grunt server will fail (yet there is no big reason why it should). The system comes with bundled node/express stack, because that is likely you would use for development use, anyway. Start the server in debug mode by

> npm start

Note that if you have run grunt debug in another window, it should be rebuilding your changed pages in the background.

To test the service in release mode, use

> grunt release
> NODE_ENV=production node server/server.js

Extending & Hacking

Project layout

App

client/             The client-side source code
client/index.html   The HTML entry point, stub page
client/app          Application source code
client/app/main.js  The app JS entry point
client/components   The 3rd party JS dependencies
client/css          The CSS templates

Build System

grunt.js            The Grunt build configuration
components.json     The Bower components
.bowerrc            The Bower directory overrides
package.json        The build level dependencies

Server Stub

server/server.js    The stub static file server
server/package.json The server specific dependencies

Build Results

staging/            Results of the build step
dist/               Minified & optimised version

TODO

• Use some sensible app boilerplate (or fetch it from another project)
• Add Cordova builds (or put it its own branch or an example)
• Add templating language compilation into JS RequireJS modules
• Add tests and travis configuration
• Add some examples & documentation

Release History

• 2013/01/16 - v0.1.0 - Initial release
• 2013/03/10 - v0.2.0 - Update to Grunt 0.4.0

License

Copyright (c) 2013 SC5, licensed for users and contributors under MIT license. https://github.com/sc5/grunt-boreless-boilerplate/blob/master/LICENSE-MIT