Web App Bundler Utility

By M@ McCray, based on http://gist.github.com/637154

I built this for how I like to work, so YMMV.

Installation

npm install wabu

Overview

WABU is built on top of Cake. Once your Cakefile is setup correctly, you can use either the supplied wabu or stock cake commands to build your web app bundles.

Bundles?

Bundles are a collection of multiple source files, all jammed together into a single distribution file.

There are two main kinds of bundle types, at this point. JavaScript, and CSS. JavaScript bundles can automatically compile CoffeeScript, and allow you to require other files to be inlined. For CSS bundles, the same is available using LESS.

In your source files you have access to some macros that wabu will use when compiling.

require [path] -- Will include the contents of the file at path.
embed([path]) -- Will include the contents of the file at path, wrapping them in whatever other text was found on the calling line.

In a CoffeeScript file, it might look like this:

#!require backbone

class MyView extends View
  @VIEW: """#!embed(templates/my-view.html)"""

  constructor: ->
    super
    @template = _.template(MyView.VIEW)
  
  render: ->
    $(@el).html @template( @model.toJSON() )

Cakefile

Before you can build your bundles, you need to setup your Cakefile. If you run wabu init it will create (or append to) a Cakefile the necessary code and some examples. Which looks ike this:

require 'wabu/tasks' unless bundle?

# You can specify default options for all bundles here
# default_options 
#   preserve: yes

# bundle "lib/wabu.js",
#   source: "src/wabu.coffee"
#   preserve: yes
#   enable: yes

# bundle "lib/wabu/cake.js",
#   source: "src/wabu/cake.coffee"
#   enable: yes

# bundle "lib/wabu/cli.js",
#   source: "src/wabu/cli.coffee"
#   enable: yes

# bundle "lib/wabu/extra.js",
#   source: [
#     "src/wabu/source_file.coffee"
#     "src/wabu/source_line.coffee"
#   ]
#   enable: yes

It will add the build task and two functions (bundle and default_options) to the global context (which is normally not good, but for a build script it's fine).

Defining Bundles

As you can tell for the aforementioned Cakefile examples, you define bundles by calling the bundle function:

bundle(output_filename, options)`

The support options are:

source: [PATH] - [REQUIRED] - File(s) to include in the bundle. Can be a single file, or array.
enable: yes|no - Ignores any bundle marked 'no.' Default: no
type: 'auto|js|css|coffee|less' - Determines if source files need to be compiled. Default: 'auto'
compress: yes|no - Default: no
preserve: yes|no - If yes, it will save a copy of the assembled file before compiling it. Default: no
noWrap: yes|no - For CoffeeScript. Setting to yes prevents the wrapping closure. Default: no
shebang: no|[STRING] -- If a shebang is defined, it will automatically add to the top of the file. Default: no

Building Bundles

You can build your bundle(s) from the command line like this:

wabu build

Or like this:

cake build

You can override the bundle options by setting some flags:

wabu --compress --preserve build

Available options:

-w, --watch        Watch files for change and automatically recompile
-c, --compress     Compress files
-q, --quiet        Suppress STDOUT messages
-p, --preserve     Saves assembled source files