Gulp + Less + Jade skeleton

This is a skeleton to build static websties using Jade and Less, plus a live-reload webserver for faster development. It uses:

• Gulp to automate build tasks, plus Gulp Connect to provide a local server with live reload .
• Jade template engine to streamline html writing.
• Less, to modularize and minimize the CSS written.

Extra things to make your website faster:

• CSS minification: both CSS and LESS files are automatically minified.
• HTML minification: the output of Jade files is minified.

Issues and/or questions

Please open a thread in https://github.com/OscarDCorbalan/gulp-less-jade-skeleton/issues

Documentation

Set-up instructions

1. Clone locally or download this repo, e.g.: * git clone https://github.com/OscarDCorbalan/gulp-less-jade-skeleton.git
2. Install (if you don't have them): * Node.js: Just download v6 and install. Alternatively, if you're on OS X, you can do brew install node . * Gulp: In a shell console type npm install -g gulp. * Gulp plugins and app dependencies: Open the repo directory in the console and type npm install or, shorter, npm i.
   • This will install any neded Node modules (cssmin, jade, less...)

What's included

Within the download you'll find the following directories and files:

├── src                   Working directory. Contains some sample files
│   ├── assets             Static assets for the site
│   │   ├── css             Yours or others' CSS files, e.g. bootstrap.css. Will be minified.
│   │   ├── fonts           Custom fonts
│   │   ├── images          These will be minified by gulp when processing them
│   │   ├── js              Yours or others' JS files, e.j. jquery.js
│   │   └── robots.txt      Default robots.txt (allows crawling everything)
│   ├── jade               Jade files to be processed by gulp-jade.
│   │   ├── templates       Partial views.
│   │   ├── index.jade      Sample index.
│   │   └── *.jade          Your Jade files.
│   └── less	           LESS files to be processed by gulp-less.
│       ├── style.less	    Sample style.
│       └── *.less 	        Your less files.
├── public                Build directory. Don't put anything here, Gulp does.
│   ├── css	               Minified CSS from assets and compiled LESS.
│   ├── fonts	           Copied asset fonts.
│   ├── images	           Minfied asset images.
│   ├── js 	               Copied asset Javascript.
│   ├── robots.txt 	       Copied asset robots.txt.
│   └── *.html	           Compiled Jade files. Html is minified.
├── gulpfile.js           Gulp tasks configuration  
├── package.json          Package configuration  
└── README.md             This file

Running it

Everything is run with Gulp.

Defined gulp tasks are:

• gulp to run all default tasks only once
• gulp server to run all tasks AND start the webserver plus a watch task. This will automatically process changes, in real time, in your source files and make them available in the local web server, and will also automatically reload your browser.

Test it

• Run gulp server
• Open http://localhost in your browser. This simple html files contains some hints if you don't know how to start.

Modifying gulp tasks

• gulpfile.js defines the tasks that are done.
• To easily modify directory names and file matcher at your discretion, they're all defined in constants.

Developing your site

• src/ dir is where you put your code and assets.
• public/ dir is fully auto-generated by Gulp. Your HTML files and everything else will be here.

Deploying your site into production

Just copy into your server everything generated in the public/ dir and you should be fine to go.

Make sure that your Jade templates generate an index.html or that your server is configured to serve any other file you want as default.

It's also possible to configure you server to automatically deploy the /public folder from a branch of your Git fork, but it's out of the scope of this Readme.

Sites built using this skeleton

Want to list yours? Just send me a message or submit a pull request.

• Taxi Sotogrande, GitHub repo