So I'm playing around with MVC6, and I've added bower.json & grunt.json, I've created my grunt tasks for generating my jQuery & bootstrap.css and its all sitting in the wwwroot folder as i expected.
But what about things like my site.css & my main.js files, the files that I will add to for the project over time.
What convention are people using when choosing a directory for this stuff?
Are we to add a Content folder and drop it in?
Is there something I'm missing, that i should also be using Grunt / bower for?
I do have app and vendor folders outside wwwroot.
In vendor, I customize libraries like bootstrap, themes.
In app I have my own css, less and js files for the application.
I also have an asset path inside app for anything that needs to be copied (folder font shown in the screenshot)
Then I use the opinionated really easy to use and way better than grunt or gulp tool: brunch.
With this simple config, I get sourcemaps, concat, jshint, and with --production also uglify, minify, csso.
Adding anything else to the pipeline is simple as installing a brunch-plugin, so I recommend to also check http://brunch.io/ out.
Any static files (.css, .js) should be added directly into the wwwroot path (e.g. wwwroot/scripts, wwwroot/css). Anything that will be compiled into static files (.ts, .less) should be put into an Assets directory (or whatever name you like) in your project and output into the wwwroot path during compilation (generally configured through grunt compilation tasks).
Related
I'm working on a plugin for Moodle that involves a lot of compiled JavaScript. Because of the complexity of the plugin, I'm writing it in TypeScript and compiling it with Webpack. This is all working fine.
However, Moodle has built-in Grunt tasks to help with JavaScript deployment, including uglifying the code. My compiled code is already minified, so this step isn't necessary. For some reason, putting the compiled code through the uglifier creates errors in the browser that aren't present with the non-uglified version. Because of this, I'm hoping to find some way to override the Grunt task.
The Grunt task is pretty simple; it uses a glob to find all javascript files in the various plugin folders in Moodle. I don't want to modify the top-level Gruntfile so that others can use this plugin without having to touch the core Moodle files. Is there a way I can create a Gruntfile (or some other flag) inside my plugin's directory that signals the parent Gruntfile to ignore my compiled file?
Unfortunately, removing my file from the watched folder is not an option. In development mode, Moodle serves the pre-compiled "src" script, so I need to keep the file there for development purposes (otherwise, I need to manually purge the cache each time I want to load the updated file).
Here's a general overview of what's happening:
Directory structure:
public (main Moodle directory)
Gruntfile.js
local
my-plugin
amd
src
my-webpack-compiled-plugin.js
build
my-webpack-compiled-plugin.min.js
my-webpack-compiled-plugin.js is the file output by Webpack (the file I don't want to be uglified)
The Gruntfile.js contains, amongst other things, this:
amd: {
files: ['**/amd/src/**/*.js'],
tasks: ['amd']
}
The amd task is where the files get uglified.
So I'm hoping to find some way to exclude local/my-plugin/amd/src/my-webpack-compiled-plugin.js from getting to the amd task from within the /local/my-plugin directory to keep my plugin self-contained.
I'm dealing with an ASP.net project that's maintained by a couple of people via git.
We're looking to minify the CSS files at build time and have checked out the bundle and minify addon however this doesn't appear to offer an option for the minified code to be regenerated from the source files at each build.
Is there a better way for us to minify our source css files on each build?
Understanding your question right, you want to concat and minify your css sources and time you build or deploy.
I do not now how your build stack look like, so I can guess only, but using css files I would use something like grunt or gulp.
On my self I prefer gulp. It is easy to create a task which concat, minify or also auto prefix your css files.
Once your task is created you can add it to your build script, task or bash.
This way works also fine with CI like wercker or travis.
You can use Microsoft Ajax Minifier after build.
Explained here: https://www.codeproject.com/Articles/182690/Minify-Javascript-and-CSS-using-Microsoft-Ajax-Min
Or if you have integration with Jenkins then after build step you can call bat file and run minification on folder of your build directory.
For multiple technology projects, You can create exe based on Microsoft Ajax Minifier and after all builds are done, Run this exe using bat command from Jenking only to minify all the css and js files.
I have integrated this with PHP, ASP.Net and Silverlight code after build of these projects.
One better way is to make your file to online file (like CDN link github can help you in that) and next rather then adding all those css add that link which will be saving much of the build time.
Try to minify your file.
Try to make an online link file.
I was planning to use Sass with my Spring-MVC application. From Sass-lang website I got this Maven LibSass Plugin. I have put it in my pom.xml
But I am really confused with what next?
The major doubts I have are:
Which directory I should keep my Sass files in?
How do I include them in my HTML files?
What should be the target dir?
As of now, if I keep directories as suggested by my plug-in, it crashes either eclipse or stalls maven clean and install goal execution. I very new to this concept. Do let me know if you need any other info.
Actually these are all up to you.
You can choose an arbitrary directory. Most probably you would not want to serve Sass files. Thus this directory should not be deployed. libsass examples use src/main/sass directory.
You should include the .css files created at the target directory manually. libsass does not handle this part. There is no automatic inclusion of the compiled .css files as in Ruby on Rails platform.
Target directory is arbitrary again. Remember the choice of directory depends on how you will refer to these files at views. For example if you will be manually referring them, most probably you'll want to specify a target directory that is actually deployed to application server, such as src/main/resources/css.
I am working on a rails app and I would like to include some custom css files inside my rails application. I would like to separate out the css from bootstrap and the css that I wrote. Could I just put the custom css files inside vendor/assets/bower_components folder in my own css folder?
Is there anything else that I need to do for my css files to be picked up?
There are several ways you can achieve bower functionality in a Rails application.
Although having said that, I'm not sure about your wanting to use it on your custom.css file. The file itself will work just as well if you keep it in your app/assets/stylesheets folder, which will concatenate it to the asset pipeline
Bower-Rails
You'll may wish to consider using bower-rails, which seems to just give you the ability to use bower within your Rails app. This seems to be specifically for helping you keep your dependencies up to date:
Dependency file is bower.json in Rails root dir or Bowerfile if you
use DSL. Check out changelog for the latest changes and releases.
RailsAssets
Another amazing piece of functionality we found recently is "RailsAssets"
This works really well (we use it in production), as it keeps your dependent assets completely up to date. You can use it very simply:
#Gemfile
source https://rails-assets.org
gem 'rails-assets-BOWER_PACKAGE_NAME'
#app/assets/javascripts/application.js
//= require BOWER_PACKAGE_NAME
When running bundle update, this will then give you the ability to update your assets in line with your app!
TL;DR: IItemTransform isn't getting executed when a minified file already exists in the same folder as the original (non-minified) file.
Problem explanation
I'm having this issue mainly because of CSS relative image references. If you used IItemTransform with Javascript files, the same applies.
This is what I'm using:
I'm using Visual Studio with Web Essentials addin to have support for LESS files
I'm writing LESS files and have Web Essentials addin automatically minify files on save
I'm also using bundling and minification in my project
When creating CSS bundles I'm using CssRewriteUrlTransform to make CSS URLs absolute (i.e. background images) so that images still work after bundling several CSS files together
Nothing unusual here so far, but it doesn't work.
What seems to be the problem?
The way that bundling and minification works is it tries to avoid excessive processing. This means that when a minified file exists in the same folder as the original one it won't run its own minification and rather serve existing file.
This would be all right as long as it would at least run transforms over those preexisting minified files. But it doesn't. So I end up with relative URLs in a bundle which breaks pretty much all those resources.
Workarounds
Always provide absolute paths in LESS files
Disable file minification on save in Web Essentials settings
Refer to minified files when defining my bundles because they don't have a minified version (*.min.css doens't have a *.min.min.css) so minifier actually picks up the file and minifies while also running transformations over it.
From the standpoint of my development process and tools used (and configured the way they are) this looks like a bug. If those files would be the result of the same minification process this wouldn't be a bug at all as transformations would be executed when minification would execute. It's true that such functionality doesn't exist and likely never will as app would need write permissions to make it work. Outcome: this is a bug. Existing minified files should be processed through transformations before being cached.
Question
Is it possible to somehow convince bundling and minification to either:
not use existing minified file versions
run transformations over existing minified versions
Have you considered using Grunt? http://gruntjs.com/
It has a learning curve, but, the information pool is huge. The issues that you are having with web essentials wouldn't be a problem with grunt.
I'm using it in VS, now, to minify, bundle and transpile both css and javascript as well as reorganize files into a deployment directory. Once you've set up a directory structure, a grunt file could very easily be reused.
With the add-on in VS (linked, below), you can right click on the grunt file and select the grunt tasks to run from a popup menu.
https://visualstudiogallery.msdn.microsoft.com/dcbc5325-79ef-4b72-960e-0a51ee33a0ff
Grunt "tasks" as they are called can be created by downloading various plugins i.e. https://www.npmjs.com/package/grunt-contrib-less.
I have never used LESS or web essentials, so please take this post for what it is worth (not much.) Could you add a pre-build command to simply delete the old files, then do a rebuild when you need to update the CSS.