projext build engines

A build engine is what takes care of bundling your target code, projext is just the intermediary.

Implementing a build engine

A build engine is a plugin that you need to install on your project, so the first requirement is to install it as a dependency, after that you should change your target(s) engine setting to the name of the build engine you installed.

On an ideal world, that would be enough, but never forget to read the plugin README.

Creating a build engine

You should probably start with the Plugins document to get an idea of how plugins work.

Once you are ready, you need to register a service with the name [your-build-engine-name]BuildEngine and it should implement one required method:

getBuildCommand(target, buildType, forceRun = false)

• target: The target information.
• buildType: development or production.
• forceRun: Whether or not the user intends to run the target after building it, even if the target runOnDevelopment setting is `false.

This should return a string with the command(s) the projext shell script should run in order to generate the bundle.

Let's create a plugin for browserify

The first thing is to create the plugin with the naming convention: projext-plugin-browserify. Now, we'll create a build engine service for it:

This example is just to show how to create the engine, it will only build the target and nothing else. Not even include it on an HTML file.

// src/browserify.js

class BrowserifyBuildEngine {
  getBuildCommand(target, buildType) {
    const entryFile = path.join(target.paths.source, target.entry[buildType]);
    const output = path.join(target.paths.build, target.name);
    return `browserify ${entryFile} -o ${output}.js`;
  }
}

module.exports = BrowserifyBuildEngine;

Really simple, right? Now, assuming the package.json main entry points to src/index.js:

// src/index.js
const BrowserifyBuildEngine = require('./browserify.js');

module.exports = (projext) => {
  projext.set('browserifyBuildEngine', () => new BrowserifyBuildEngine());
};

Done, the only thing to do now is to change a target engine setting to browserify and when building, it will create a bundle using Browserify.