Catapult
Simple gem that gives pure JavaScript/CoffeeScript projects a basic structure, and manages any necessary compilation and concatenation.
Catapult is especially useful alongside MVC frameworks like Spine and Backbone.
Installation
$ gem install catapult
Usage
To generate an app, use:
$ catapult new myapp
create myapp
create myapp/assets/javascripts/app.js
create myapp/assets/stylesheets/app.css
create myapp/browser.json
create myapp/public/index.htm
$ cd myapp
You'll notice a bunch of files have been created. The convention in Catapult is that any assets under assets/javascripts and assets/stylsheets will be compiled under the static public directory. Your HTML files can reference them there.
Now you can start a catapult server:
$ catapult server
And open up the app in your browser.
You can also build the files for deployment:
$ catapult build
Or watch the files for changes, and then automatically build:
$ catapult watch
Concatenation
Catapult uses Sprockets for concatenation. Sprockets uses meta comments to specify dependencies. For example:
//= require jquery
//= require ./other_file
//= require_tree ./app
See the Sprockets documentation for more information.
Included compilers
Sprockets will automatically compile certain file types when the files are first requested. For example, files with .coffee extensions will be compiled down to JavaScript before being served up to the end user.
The included Sprockets compilers are: CoffeeScript, sprockets-commonjs and Stylus. You can include additional ones by simply adding them to your project's Gemfile.
Deploying to Heroku
It's a good idea to just serve up static files in production, and disable the asset compilation.
If you're using a system like Apache, you can just serve up the static files under the ./public dir. Otherwise, with a Rack based system, like Heroku, you're going to need a few files:
Firstly, a Gemfile:
source 'https://rubygems.org'
gem 'catapult'
Then a config.ru file, serving up the static files:
require 'catapult'
use Catapult::TryStatic,
:root => Catapult.root.join('public'),
:urls => %w[/],
:try => ['.html', 'index.html', '/index.html']
run lambda {|env|
[404, {}, ['Not found']]
}