Gulp asset compiler to be used as a base for website development. Uses a combination of Yarn and Bower to pull in assets ready to begin front end site builds.
Pre-packaged in the base repo are jQuery, Twitter Bootstrap and Font Awesome to simplify start-up.
Node, Gulp, Bower and Yarn need to be installed and accessible globally.
To install Node, visit their website and follow the instructions provided for your operating system.
Once Node has been installed globally Gulp, Bower and Yarn can be installed with Node's package manager (npm) via the command line.
The required Gulp, Bower and Yarn can be globally installed simultaneously by running the following command
npm install -g gulp bower yarn
A few commands are required to get your project up and running, here we will install the Gulp package dependencies outlined in the packages.json file using Yarn. Execute the following command in the root directory of your project, where the packages.json file can be located.
yarn install
Next up we require our Bower packages (jQuery, Bootrap and Font Awesome in our case). These will install into the src/vendor, this can be changed in the .bowerrc file. To install the Bower packages simply run the following in your command line.
bower install
That will be all we need to do to get up and running with out frontend developement asset stack. To begin development and to start compiling our site assets (configured in the gulpconfig.json file) run the following via command line.
gulp
Gulp will no be running on your system, this can be tested by saving one of your site assets underneath the src.
Information on Gulp packages to come.
Issues have been encountered in the past with node_modules clogging up precious hard drive space, thankfully the developers at Facebook and have up with a neat solution with their Yarn dependency manager. If you are unfamililar with Yarn, head over to their website for the lowdown.