Beans

Beans is a set of tools for authoring Node modules written in CoffeeScript, and optionally targeting the browser. It does something that your own Cakefile would do, except that you don't need to copy the same Cakefile around all of your CoffeeScript projects.

Usage

Beans is installed with npm. To have a global up-to-date beans binary in your PATH, install globally:

$ npm install beans -g

A less convenient, but more stable solution is to have a local version of Beans, specific for each of your authored packages. To do this, first install Beans globally, then run beans scripts. This will add Beans to your devDependencies and register commands like build and docs in package.json. These commands can then be run like so:

$ npm run-script build

A list of available commands can be obtained by typing beans help. In essence, Beans provides single and continuous build routines, a test runner using nodeunit, and documentation generation using Docco.

Principal command details:

• beans build issues a single build according to the project configuration (see below). If building for the browser is required, source is concatenated to a single file and a minified copy is created.
• beans watch starts a continuous build process, rebuilding when any CoffeeScript file is modified.
• beans test tries to do a successful build and runs nodeunit tests afterwards. Tests should be placed in the test folder (or its subfolders) and should have the .test.coffee extension, in order for Beans to locate them.
• beans docs generates documentation form source. This command expects Docco to be installed globally (npm install docco -g).
• beans publish rebuilds everything once and runs npm publish.

Configuration

Beans collects some information from package.json and beans.json files. Most of it is used when building for the browser. Create a beans.json file to override the following build defaults:

{
  "browser": {
    "enabled": true,
    "paths": [<values of paths object>],
    "prefix": "",
    "rootModule": <same as package name>
  },
  "copyrightFrom": <current year>,
  "license": <unspecified>,
  "paths": {
    "src": "lib"
  }
}

A sample beans.json file can be found in Beans own source, since Beans is written in CoffeeScript and authored with itself, of course. Each key-value pair is optional. In detail:

• browser.enabled is a switch to turn browser bundling on or off. The bundle is created using Stitch and minified with UglifyJS.
• browser.paths is an array of source paths for Stitch. Relative paths are resolved to the current working directory. Default path is the compilation target paths array: this is okay, since bundling happens only after everything is compiled.
• browser.prefix is used as a prefix for browser bundle filenames.
• browser.rootModule is a package module that is required automatically in the browser and attached to the global object. Beans makes Stitch's require run in a closure, so this function won't be available. The only exposed module is the specified root module. Make sure it exports everything you need.
• copyrightFrom is a starting copyright year (e.g. 2010) that defaults to the current year. The browser bundle header comment will have a copyright notice featuring a span from the configured to year to current one (e.g. 2010-2011).
• license is the license you're using for the project. If a license is specified, it is displayes in the browser bundle header comment.
• paths is an object with source paths as keys and target paths as values. CoffeeScript files in source paths are going to be compiled to JavaScript and placed in the corresponding target paths. The folder hierarchy is kept intact.

Hooks

When building CoffeeScript files, Beans allows to preprocess tokenize, parse, and compile steps of source processing. This could be used to mangle the token stream, AST, or resulting JavaScript source of each file, before writing to disk.

To preprocess any step, a hook file must be created in any convenient location. A hook file is a Node module written in CoffeeScript or JavaScript. It should export a single function like this:

module.exports = (filename, data) ->
  console.log filename  # this is the currently compiled file (target) 
  data                  # return modified data 

The value of data argument depends on the type of hook:

• The tokenize hook receives a token stream.
• The parse hook receives an AST object.
• The compile hook is called after compilation, but before the file has been written out. It receives a JavaScript source string.
• The write hook is called after the file has been written out. It receives a JavaScript source string.

The values for the first three cases come straight from CoffeeScript's lexer, parser, and compiler. Consequently, their format is the same as the format expected from CoffeeScript's tokens, nodes, and compile methods.

A hook can either return modified data, or nothing. In the latter case, the compiler proceeds with the original value of data.

There also exist three hooks that export a function without arguments:

• The begin hook that runs before the build starts.
• The end hook that runs after the build ends.
• The bundle hook that runs after the browser bundle is created.

To register a hook file, a hooks section should be added to package.json. For example, to register scripts/parse.coffee and scripts/compile.coffee:

{
  "hooks": {
    "parse": "scripts/parse",
    "compile": "scripts/compile"
  }
}

Included Files

Beans can fetch files from local and remote sources, glue them together and write to disk. The target files can be built on demand by issuing the beans include command.

To register an included file, a browser.include section should be added to package.json. This section contains an object, where keys are target files and values are local and/or remote source files. Local paths can be glob patterns. For example, to glue together jQuery, jQuery UI, and one more local library in one file:

{
  "browser": {
    "include": {
      "public/js/jquery.js": [
        "https://example.com/path/to/jquery.min.js",
        "https://example.com/path/to/jquery-ui.min.js",
        "support/path/to/additional-library.min.js"
      ]
    }
  }
}