Help Scout Prototypes

Quickstart

Clone this repository and build on what is included in the app directory.

Be sure to look over the installation docs to verify your environment is prepared to run this. Once you have verified that your system can run it, check out the commands available to get started.

Prerequisites

Node.js

Bring up a terminal and type node --version. Node should respond with a version at or above 0.10.x. If you require Node, go to nodejs.org and click on the big green Install button.

Bring up a terminal and type gulp --version. If Gulp is installed it should return a version number at or above 3.9.x. If you need to install/upgrade Gulp, open up a terminal and type in the following:

$ npm install --global gulp

This will install Gulp globally. Depending on your user account, you may need to configure your system to install packages globally without administrative privileges.

Local dependencies

Next, install the local dependencies requires:

$ npm install

Note: if you have the Yarn package manager installed, you can just run yarn.

That's it!

There are many commands available to help you build and test sites. Here are a few highlights to get started with.

Commands

Watch For Changes & Automatically Refresh Across Devices

$ gulp serve

This outputs an IP address you can use to locally test and another that can be used on devices connected to your network. serve does not use service worker caching, so your site will stop being available when the web server stops running.

Build & Optimize

$ gulp

Build and optimize the current project, ready for deployment. This includes linting as well as image, script, stylesheet and HTML optimization and minification. Also, a service worker script will be automatically generated, which will take care of precaching your sites' resources. On browsers that support service workers, the site will be loaded directly from the service worker cache, bypassing the server. This means that this version of the site will work when the server isn't running or when there is no network connectivity.

Serve the Fully Built & Optimized Site

$ gulp serve:dist

This outputs an IP address you can use to locally test and another that can be used on devices connected to your network. serve:dist includes will serve a local copy of the built and optimized site generated as part of the default task. Because the optimized site includes a service worker which serves your site directly from the cache, you will need to reload the page after regenerating the site to pick up the latest changes. serve:dist uses a different HTTP port than serve, which means that the service workers are kept isolated in different scopes.

Difference Between `serve` & `serve:dist`

It is important to note a difference between the serve and serve:dist tasks.

serve uses a no-op service-worker.js and cannot run offline.
serve:dist uses the sw-precache-generated output and can run offline.

The serve task runs on port 3000 and serve:dist runs on port 3001. The main purpose is to ensure that different service workers will not impact each other's environment. Using the sw-precache-generated output makes it very difficult to quickly test local changes which is not ideal for a development server environment.

Performance Insights

$ gulp pagespeed

Runs the deployed (public) version of your site against the PageSpeed Insights API to help you stay on top of where you can improve.

tony-jones/prototypes