I'm using the Yeoman stack to bootstrap an application and had a question on how CSS files should be handled. (I've uploaded a sample on Github : https://github.com/ddewaele/jQueryDataTablesGrunt)
The basic question is : How do you go about handling different CSS files
during development (when running grunt serve)
when packaging the app (when running grunt build).
I have installed a number of libraries through bower that come with CSS files.
For example the jQueryDataTables library has the following CSS
bower_components/datatables/media/css/jquery.dataTables.css
Now, the way I understand it is that I should never reference this jquery.dataTables.css file directly in my index.html (I hope this assumption is correct).
My index.html should only contain
<link rel="stylesheet" href="styles/main.css">
I assume that this styles/main.css will be generated by the grunt workflow and will be correct both in dev mode, as well as in dist mode.
I'm puzzled by a couple of things
How should I tell grunt that I need to include for example bower_components/datatables/media/css/jquery.dataTables.css
Do I do need to reference that jquery.dataTables.css in my index.html, or in my Gruntfile.js, or simply drop it in app.styles ?
How does grunt decide what CSS files it needs to assemble into a single main.css
How does grunts behavior differ between grunt serve and grunt serve dist
Here's what I found :
grunt serve
When calling grunt serve , a CSS file is generated called .tmp/styles/main.css,
That is in fact the CSS file that is used by the app when it launched by 'grunt serve'.
That main.css file only contains stuff coming from the app/styles/main.scss file.
Other CSS files that are put in app/styles/ are not being picked up by grunt serve.
grunt serve:dist
When calling grunt serve:dist, a CSS file is generated called dist/styles/2314bw1.main.css
That is in fact the CSS file that is used by the app when it launched by grunt serve:dist.
That main.css file contains everything that it found in app/styles/*.css,
So the basic issue is that when running grunt serve , the generated main.css does not all the classes from all the css files found in app/styles/*.css.
However, when packaging the app grunt build or grunt serve:dist, it does contain all classes from all the css files found in app/styles/*.css.
How do I configure my app / grunt to use these external CSS, and how do I get to a situation that works during development, as well as during packaging.
I'm not familiar with Yeoman but it look likes it's running gruntjs underneath. You can edit the tasks to include plugin specific styles.
This is your gruntfile.js
How does grunt decide what CSS files it needs to assemble into a single main.css ?
Drop your plugin specfic styles inside "app/styles". You can give it a special folder if you want to. Then add to your main.scss. Sass will compile everything down in the main.css.
First in console:
cp jquery.dataTables.css jquery.dataTables.scss
Then add the import into main.scss
#import "jquery.dataTables"
How does grunts behavior differ between grunt serve and grunt serve dist?
serve:dist does this(see code below), it builds your files, opens a link to your server, creates a dummy webserver to serve your files using connect
if (target === 'dist') {
return grunt.task.run(['build', 'open:server', 'connect:dist:keepalive']);
}
serve on the other hand watches changes to your files.
Related
I'm trying to use the File Watcher tool in the Jetbrains IDE (Webstorm and Rider) to automatically minify my .css files and generate .min.css files for them on the whole project.
Thing is, it keeps minifying files that already have .min.css as the extension. So I end up with files like slick.min.min.css. I can't find any option to control what the criteria is for matching files. Is there some option to force it to ignore .min.css files, so I don't get duplicates?
I was following this guide here: https://www.jetbrains.com/help/idea/compressing-css.html#ws_css_compress_create_file_watcher
with some tips from here How to Minify CSS with SCSS File Watcher in PHPStorm IDE
As .min.css files are still CSS files, your watcher listens to changes in all them ( because watcher Scope == Project files, File type == CSS) and produces the output.
As a workaround I can suggest excluding minified files from watchers processing:
create a new scope (Settings | Appearance & Behavior | Scopes) with minified files excluded (like file:.css&&!file:*.min.css)
choose this scope as your file watcher Scope
I installed Bootstrap CSS with SASS from the following repo:
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass
I ran the command "bower install bootstrap-sass" on the command line and this successfully installed the folder bower_components on my project folder. (Incidentally - I have nothing else present yet, I want to learn to bootstrap the CSS compiling first).
OK, here's what I want to accomplish:
I want to be able to add .scss files to the folder I create called resources/assets/sass/
I want to provision/manage so that .scss files I add to this directory are in turn compiled to public/build/css/that_file_name.css
More practically, I would like to compile all of the .scss files into one large .css file.
My question(s) are:
What does the compiling?
How do I instruct it to compile the .scss files in the folder above in the public/build/css/ folder?
Must I configure new .scss files or can I set it so as to just add them to that sass folder?
Bonus, how do I tell it to minify the output file, or not (so I can experiment with both ways)?
What does the compiling?
Compiling Sass files transforms stylesheets with Sass-specific syntax like selector nesting and mixins into normal CSS that can be parsed by browsers.
How do I instruct it to compile the .scss files in the folder above in the public/build/css/ folder?
Since you're already using Bower which is a Node.js package, I assume that you have no problem using the Node.js package node-sass instead of the original Ruby version.
First, install the package using npm i -D node-sass. Then, create a new script inside your project's package.json:
"compile-sass": "node-sass resources/assets/sass/main.scss public/build/css/main.css"
main.scss is now your entry point where you import Bootstrap and your other stylesheets.
// I don't know whether this path is correct
// Just find out the location of "_bootstrap.scss" and then create the relative path
#import "../../../bower_components/bootstrap-sass/assets/stylesheets/_bootstrap.scss";
/* Your custom SCSS */
Finally, to actually run the compilation, execute npm run compile-sass in your terminal.
Must I configure new .scss files or can I set it so as to just add them to that sass folder?
Since you never tell node-sass to "compile everything inside this folder" and instead use an entry point file (main.js), when you want to include a new file you simply add an #import directive with a relative path to it.
Bonus, how do I tell it to minify the output file, or not (so I can experiment with both ways)?
To minify the resulting main.css file, I recommend csso. You can install its CLI package using npm i -D csso-cli and then add another script to your package.json:
"minify-css": "csso public/build/css/main.css public/build/css/main.min.css"
You can then run that script using npm run minify-css. The minified file will be outputted as main.min.css.
For all the question asked, the answer can be found above. But if you are just looking to compile .scss file to .css using command line, use below,
sass source/stylesheets/index.scss build/stylesheets/index.css
Make sure you have "node JS/npm" and Sass compiler installed.
If not, use this to install Node.js and npm - https://www.npmjs.com/get-npm
And use this to install Sass - https://sass-lang.com/install
Enjoy ;)
I am completely new to all this, 'Bower' and 'Gulp' and Laravel 'Elixir'. I purchased a template that uses them (unfortunately) and now I need some help on how to go about implementing them. I have already installed NPM and Bower. All my packages have been downloaded into:
resources > assets > vendor
This is a screenshot:
Now my question is how do I include all those packages I downloaded in my view? From my understanding I can't run less files directly in the browser, it only runs once due to 'browser caching' or something like that, also the JS scripts are just too many to include in my page.
I want a way where I can work on my files and have them automatically compiled with the compiled files being referenced in my app.php file.
This is a link to the GulpJS file included in my template: http://pastebin.com/3PSN6NZY
You do not need to compile every time someone visits. The compiled sass/js should be run in dev and then the output files referenced.
If you have gulp installed on the project, you should see a gulp.js file in the root of your project. If not, visit here for instructions:
Gulp/Elixer installation and setup
In your gulp.js file:
var elixir = require('laravel-elixir');
elixir(function(mix) {
mix.less([
'app.less',
'normalize.less',
'some-other-less.less',
'and-another.less'
]);
mix.scripts(['app.js', 'some-other-js.js'], 'public/js/output-file.js');
});
While in development you can run gulp watch from the command line to listen for changes and run compile tasks when it hears a change. Then you simply reference the output files in the public directory as you normally would.
If you don't want to listen, you can just run the gulp command for a single once-off task run.
The docs are pretty straight forward and can be found here:
Gulp/Elixer docs
With Yeomam I choose Webapp project with bootstrap and scss.
In the html file it includes reference to main.css.
To run it I need to run grunt serve which creates main.css file from main.scss.
If I run directly the files from browser I will miss main.css because it has not been created from scss.
How can I create it in order to run from browser without grunt?
Another option to compile scss, programs like prepros or codekit, I use it daily in my work
prepros free:
https://prepros.io/
codekit:
https://incident57.com/codekit/
I have a pretty basic SASS setup running, which includes the following folder structure:
css
style.css
-modules
_all.scss
_globals.scss
partials
_base.scss
_normalize.scss
_styles.scss
vendor
-empty
I am telling SASS to watch the following sass --watch modules/_all.scss:style.css --style compact.
The issue is, that one one machine a change to ANY file included in _all.scss is recorded and output properly. On another machine, completely up to date, a change to a partial file thats included in _all.scss does not record a change, and therefore no styles are output. I have to reset SASS to watch the partial _all.scss once more for the change to be recorded.
Has anyone experienced these inconsistencies before? I'm not looking to watch an entire directory as I wish to have only a single stylesheet output...
Both builds have the same version of sass, ruby and command line tools running.
It seems like the sass-cache is not being busted when you make the change. You can try disabling the cache on the broken machine to see if the problem resolves. If it does, check manually delete the cache directory and try again.
Side note, you shouldn't have to use the watch command with rails (unless you're doing something unique). Sprockets is supposed to have plugins which do this automatically when serving assets.
In fact, I suspect that this may even be a conflict between sprocket's SASS engine configuration and the sass watcher binary configuration.
See the default cache configuration for the sass binary here: http://sass-lang.com/documentation/file.SASS_REFERENCE.html#cache_location-option