threax-npm-tk

This project provides a build system for the front end for Threax Hypermedia Framework projects. It enables the use of artifacts.json files to describe what to publish for a project. It also supports the other commands the framework makes use of like tsimport or clean. It is written in typescript and compiles to javascript.

Installing

Globally

Ideally install this as a global package.

Run npm install -g threax-npm-tk to install.

You probably also want typescript npm install -g typescript.

Project

You can also install the toolkit in your project by adding threax-npm-tk to devDependencies in the package.json file in your repo. This will then override any calls to threax-npm-tk to your locally installed copy. While backward compatibility is a big part of the toolkit this can help you fix a problematic program that can't be updated right away. However, due to bloat in the node_modules directory this should be avoided if possible.

Running

Run the program with threax-npm-tk here are the example tasks from a framework project:

"build": "threax-npm-tk build && dotnet bundle",
"clean": "threax-npm-tk clean",
"trash-modules": "threax-npm-tk clean -o node_modules",
"import-tsconfig": "threax-npm-tk tsconfig"

Artifacts.json

This file describes how to copy files in a project. A typical project comes with a file that looks like the following:

[
  {
    "typescript": {
      "compile": true
    }
  },
  {
    "pathBase": "Client",
    "outDir": ".",
    "copy": [
      "Client/Images/*"
    ]
  }
]

This tells the artifacts system to build the local typescript config and to copy any images from the Client/Images folder. This only describes the resources for the current project. For other modules each npm package will have an artifacts.json file that is scanned for during build. The combined output of all of these files will be written to the output directories. This makes it easy to pull in dependencies without needing to modify a ton of config files.

Development

Building

To build run tsc in the root directory. This will update all the javascript files.

Running Local Copy

To test the local results run node .\run.js to run the program.