Node.js tooling
Tooling in nodejs
Ever thought of using NPM as build tool?
We can use npm as a build tool, which I highly discourage doing unless and until we have a very small and isolated app. If you are going to use package.json or npm as a build tool, then number of options you are going to have is limited.
I would rather recommend using modules like Grunt, Gulp or Broccoli.
If you use NPM as build tool, you can make use of “npm start”, “npm test”, “npm stop”, note that start, test, stop are part of script in package.json file. If you want to use NPM as build tool then strengthen yourself here
Yeoman
The web scaffolding tool for mordern webapps.
For nodejs we don’t have an official IDE which creates the projects and file for you. Since you see the versatility of nodejs. So they have come up with a module YEOMAN. It is THE WEB’S SCAFFOLDING TOOL FOR MODERN WEBAPPS. Yo is the scaffolding tool engine which leverages bower and grunt to build the whole process. We can use the Yeoman generater for creating a node module. Yeoman setup is one time installation. For running Yeoman we would require three modules.
Use this command to install:
# this command installs yeoman, bower and grunt-cli:
$ npm install -g yo bower grunt-cli
Since it has -g flag, so it can run from anywhere in the terminal. Remember, for bower to work you should have git installed on your machine. To know more about bower, visit here. Bower and npmjs are both package managers. Bower offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management. We can also search for bower packages (like we do for npm). The difference between npm and bower is that npm is hierarchical dependency manager. You can create your own module and publish it on bower. Remember bower is mainly for front development.
We want to create a nodejs module using Yeoman. For that just search ‘node’ at Discovering generators. The official generators are marked moustache. We have this project named generator-node. Let’s say we want to create a new node module and push it to the npm repository, for that reason we don’t want to manually generate everything every single time. Here we are going to install generator-node. generator-node takes care of scaffolding the project for you on the fly.
Install generator-node:
$ npm install --global generator-node
To use:
$ yo node
Here we are done. Now bunch of question about the project would be asked. It creates the whole project structure for you. It generates README.md, package.json, index.js (all our business logic is going to be written here), etc.
What is grunt?
Grunt is like Ant script, Maven or Gradle in java, i.e. build tool. In one word Grunt is basically automation. We will be writing a bunch of things in the grunt ecosystem to do automated process. Grunt is basically a configuration based tool where we specify what needs to be done.