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CSS BUILD PROCESS TUTORIAL

This is the source code for a the screencast I posted at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDm6e7OKi4M with a coresponding blog post at http://kaidez.com/css-build-demo/. It's based on a code refactor I had to do for work and I used it as a test project for my process.

Everything is under an MIT license so feel free to use it as you see fit on my blog.

HOW THE CODE WORKS

The production-code is in build. Run it by either opening index.html in a web browser or running the the code from the server setup of your choice.

PLAY WITH THE BUILT OUT CODE

The files in build get built out using three pieces of pre-processor software: Jade, LESS and Coffeescript.

There's one built-out web page: build/index.html and it's built out with Jade.

All styles are in build/css/styles.min.css with LESS. The styles contain both custom code and a custom build-out of Twitter Bootstrap's core CSS.

To understand what the styles do, it's best to go to css-build and review both styles.less and everything in the import folder...things are commented quite well in there.

All the JavaScript is processed with Coffeescript, which builds out the code to build/js/main.js. The preprocess files are in coffee and are commented quite nicely.

To play with all the preprocessor code, you would need to download the following software:

Node/npm will download all the all the development-level dependencies listed as devDependencies inside package.json.

While source code control is not required to do anything with either the built-out files or various pre-processors, Git is required to interact with Bower. This is because Bower will download the packages listed as dependencies in bower.json and these dependencies are almost always downloaded from on GitHub via Git.

npm will install both Grunt and Gulp locally to the project folder, but their respective globally-installed versions need to be installed as well. After Node/npm is installed, thinstall Grunt and Gulp as follows:

Grunt

$ npm install -g grunt-cli

Gulp

$ npm install --global gulp

Install devDependencies and dependencies

After all these things have been installed, you can install the devDependencies listed in package.json:

$ npm install

And then install the dependencies

$ bower install

In order to keep the devDependencies up to date, it's best to globally install npm-check-updates:

$ npm install -g npm-check-updates

From there, use the command line to periodically navigate to the spot in your project where package.json is located and run:

$ npm-check-updates

This will check to see if the devDependencies listed in package.json have been updated on https://www.npmjs.com/. If they have, you will be walked through the process of updating them.

Bower can check for updates on its own and without third party software:

$ bower list

This will check to see if the dependencies listed in bower.json have been updated on http://bower.io/. If they have, you can update them:

$ bower update

This is a lazy way of updating Bower packages...read about updating with options at http://bower.io/docs/api/#update.

About

This is the source code for my CSS build process tutorial.

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