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gulp-exist-example

What can you achieve with gulp-exist? Have a try and find out.

A completely ant-less build of a existdb application.

Prerequisites

  • NodeJS
  • an existdb (preferrably 5.0.0 or later) instance running

Installation

  1. Create a project-folder my-new-app with this example in it:

    npx degit line-o/gulp-exist-example#main my-new-app

  2. Switch to that project-folder and install the dependencies:

    cd my-new-app
npm i

  3. (optional) Copy the example env file cp .env.example .env

  4. (optional) Modify the variables to match your setup

Things you can do

For convenience this example defines three npm-scripts. This way there is no need to install any package globally (namely gulp).

  • npm start : create XAR package and deploy it immediately to an existdb instance
  • npm run build: create XAR package (in the dist-folder of your project)
  • npm run watch: start a watcher, builds and deploys changed files to existdb

The scripts above will first call dotenv before calling the gulp task itself. This will read the connection options from .env and set them as variables in ENV.

Testing it for the first time

  • run gulp install
  • have a look at the packagemanager of your existdb instance
  • increase the version in package.json
  • then run gulp install again

Further down the rabbit hole

  • run gulp watch and change anything in the src folder
  • observe how SCSS is compiled, JavaScript minified and static files copied
  • after that it will immediately be synced to your database, too

What else?

gulp --tasks will give you an idea of gulp tasks you can try.

├── clean
├── templates
├── watch:tmpl
├── styles
├── watch:styles
├── minify
├── watch:es
├── copy
├── watch:static
├── build
├── watch
├── deploy
├── xar
├── install
└── default

How does it work?

The gulpfile.js gathers metadata from package.json to populate the package descriptor dynamically. Additional Also the server connection is read from environment variables.

variable default value description
EXIST_SERVER https://localhost:8443 the URL to connect to the existdb server
EXIST_USER admin the user to connect to the existdb server
EXIST_PASS empty the password for the user (must be set in order for EXIST_USER to take effect)

You can also look at dotenv-cli documentation for more options.

The resulting XAR can now also be installed directly from gulp (actually directly using one of the latest features in node-exist).

What's next?

  • SCSS is kind of dated, a postCSS example might be more interesting
  • refactor the template replacement into either gulp-exist or even an npm package of its own
  • investigate npm initializers (think create-react-app)
  • If you have an idea what would be useful -> open an issue :)