Build Utilities for One Darnley Road

It's probably not of much use to anyone but us! We're used to doing things in a certain way in most of our projects, so this is a way to DRY out our gulpfiles, and allow older projects to benefit from improvements made in newer ones.

It's also a way to reuse little front end components (mostly JS) again doing things in the same way we always do. Hopefully our projects start to become a bit more about configuration of functionality that lives here.

Installation

As a contributor to this repo

You can use NPM link:

As you develop, assuming you have access, you'll want to add things to this repo and thus the package. One way would be to add code, commit, push, npm publish, and then have to npm update in the active project. It's a bit of a faff that might get in the way of developing files in the project.

To get around this, we can use npm link to the git repo.

The steps go like this:

First clone the repository of this module (somewhere other than your main project), and cd into it. Then set it up as an npm to be linked elsewhere.

1. Clone the repo and move into that folder

$ git clone https://github.com/onedarnleyroad/build-utilities && cd build-utilities

2. Install dependencies. This is important as the tools rely on various gulp plugins and so on, but because this will be symlinked, the project will not be able to find them.

$ npm install

Finally link the package:

$ npm link

The last command will set it up as a globally available symlink to NPM. Or something. I'm still R-ing-TFM

The next step is to link this module in your current project(s):

$ cd /my/project
$ npm install --save-dev 1dr-build-utitilies // this is kinda optional
$ npm link 1dr-build-utilities

That's actually it, the utilities are now available in the repo. The second install is optional as it means that if someone else is working on the /my/project repo, but you do not want them to have access to edit 1dr-build-utilities then you are saving this package to package.json and other developers can still use the tools. But bear in mind there may be a discrepancy in what they compile and what you compile. But for our own use case, this is probably not a real scenario.

**NB: You must npm install before the npm link, so that the link 'overwrites' the package downloaded from npm. If it's already linke then npm install will not overwrite it. However, if you run npm install 1dr-build-utilities after the npm link 1dr-build-utilities this will remove the link, and install whatever is hosted on NPM.

Further reading: http://justjs.com/posts/npm-link-developing-your-own-npm-modules-without-tears The above is useful because it explains getting around having to type sudo to make the link work, and what's going on with this method.

Simple installation

If you're just using this repo, but not ever making changes to it (perhaps you aren't 1DR), or you're happy to just npm publish on this repo whenever you've got new files to add or change then you can install the traditional way:

$ npm install --save-dev 1dr-build-utilities

It's just a module like any other, but since this set of utilities will contain front end assets that are most likely going to be compiled with gulp, if people have different versions of the modules, then the resulting bundles may have outdated or differently-behaving code, and it could be a bit of a mess for production code. That may just be the price to pay, but it's also possible to use package.json (assuming you're not npm linking) to control the package version.

Usage

TBC...