The Noble Scaffold

By ProjectAMPLE & Nobalai

Automate distribution of multiple production versions alongside a bleeding edge development version with optimized cache busting while programmatically generating a versions manifest file.

Features include:

• Versioning
  • development and automatic multiple frozen production versions
    • optimized client side caching since only newly modified modules are created in new version build directory
    • (See external repositories in django and JS for one implementation on how to use them)
    • Keep x past versions, and delete older versions which have no dependencies to the current build.
  • random name generator for new versions
  • automatically increment version name based on patch/minor/major flags
  • pull branch name
  • compare file hashes to find newly modified modules/files
• Webpack
  • module bundling with optional split by name (webpack)
  • live reload with webpack-dev-server
  • 2 webpack config files with proper inheritance of arrays, loaders and plugins
• Transpilation
  • es6 with babel
  • scss
• Bundling
  • minification (js & css)

Example

In the example version-manifest.json below, a minor update was released (gulp release) which only modified example/src/moduleA.js.

Version manifest array:

[
  {
    "name": "vicarious-thrill",
    "id": "0.1.1",
    "type": "minor",
    "branch": "master",
    "production": true,
    "created": "3/2/2016, 10:42",
    "timestamp": "2016-03-02T15:42:52.287Z",
    "notes": "N/A",
    "schemaChange": false,
    "modules": {
      "js": {
        "app": "nondescript-nation",
        "lib": "nondescript-nation",
        "moduleA": "vicarious-thrill",
        "moduleB": "nondescript-nation",
        "moduleC": "nondescript-nation"
      },
      "css": {
        "app": "nondescript-nation"
      },
      "vendor": {}
    }
  },
  {
    "name": "nondescript-nation",
    "id": "0.0.1",
    "type": "patch",
    "branch": "master",
    "production": false,
    "created": "3/2/2016, 10:20",
    "timestamp": "2016-03-02T15:20:31.171Z",
    "notes": "N/A",
    "schemaChange": false,
    "modules": {
      "js": {
        "app": "nondescript-nation",
        "lib": "nondescript-nation",
        "moduleA": "nondescript-nation",
        "moduleB": "nondescript-nation",
        "moduleC": "nondescript-nation"
      },
      "css": {
        "app": "nondescript-nation"
        },
      "vendor": {}
    }
  }
]

The build directory will contain:

versions
    ├── 0.0.1-nondescript-nation
    │   ├── css
    │   │   └── moduleA.css
    │   ├── js
    │   │   ├── app.js
    │   │   ├── lib.js
    │   │   ├── main.js
    │   │   ├── moduleA.js
    │   │   ├── moduleB.js
    │   │   └── moduleC.js
    │   └── vendor
    └── 0.1.1-vicarious-thrill
        ├── css
        ├── js
        │   └── moduleA.js
        │   
        └── vendor

On the client side production version, the developer will need to either manually patch in the generated files into an HTML file or automate this process with a server side build script (I'm currently working on releasing an open source version of my django/python solution soon)

Manifest Options

Adding keep: true to a version entry ensures this version won't be deleted

Gulpfile options

Webpack Links

• https://webpack.github.io/docs/list-of-plugins.html

TODO

• Add vendor module separation
• Clean up repository and comments