react-component-gulp-tasks

This package provides common gulp tasks for building react components with:

Browserify for transforming JSX and creating distribution builds
Watchify for automatic, efficient rebundling on file changes
Connect for serving examples during development, with live-reload integration
LESS stylesheets for examples
Publishing examples to Github Pages
Publishing packages to npm and bower

You control the settings for the tasks by providing a config object, as described below.

Project setup

The tasks assume you are following the following conventions for your project:

Package source has a single entry point in a source folder
The package will be published to both npm and bower
A transpiled version will be published to a lib folder (for Node.js, Browserify and Webpack)
A standalone package will be published to a dist folder (for Bower)
Examples consist of
- Static file(s) (e.g. html, images, etc)
- One or more stylesheets to be generated with LESS
- One or more scripts to be bundled with Browserify
Examples will be packaged into an examples dist folder, and published to github pages

Example project structure

bower.json
package.json
gulpfile.js
src
    MyComponent.js
less
    my-component.less
lib
    // contains transpiled source
    MyComponent.js
dist
    // contains packaged component
    my-component.js
    my-component.min.js
    my-component.css
example
    dist
        // contains built examples
    src
        app.js
        app.less
        index.html

For a complete example see JedWatson/react-component-starter

Usage

npm install --save-dev gulp react-component-gulp-tasks

In your gulpfile, call this package with your gulp instance and config. It will add the tasks to gulp for you. You can also add your own tasks if you want.

var gulp = require('gulp');
var initGulpTasks = require('react-component-gulp-tasks');
var taskConfig = require('./config');
 
initGulpTasks(gulp, taskConfig);

Task Config

You can customise the tasks to match your project structure by changing the config.

Required config keys are:

Component

component.file - the source (entry) file for the component
component.name - controls the standalone module name
component.src - the directory to load the source file from
component.dist - the directory to build the distribution to
component.pkgName - the name of the package that will be exported by the component (must match the name of your package on npm)
component.dependencies[] - array of common dependencies that will be excluded from the build, and included in a common bundle for the examples
component.less.entry - the entrypoint for the component stylesheet, if you're using less to provide one
component.less.path - the path of the less files. everything with a .less extension in this directory will be watched in for changes in development

Example

example.src - the directory to load the source files from
example.dist - the directory to build the distribution to
example.files[] - files will be copied as-is into the example.dist folder
example.scripts[] - scripts will be transpiled with babel and bundled by browserify
example.less[] - stylesheets will be generated with LESS
example.port - port to serve examples on, defaults to 8000

Example

This is an example of the config.js file for the project structure above:

var gulp = require('gulp');
var initGulpTasks = require('react-component-gulp-tasks');
 
var taskConfig = {
 
    component: {
        name: 'MyComponent',
        dependencies: [
            'blacklist',
            'classnames',
            'react',
            'react/addons'
        ],
        less: {
            path: 'less',
            entry: 'my-component.less'
        }
    },
 
    example: {
        src: 'example/src',
        dist: 'example/dist',
        files: [
            'index.html'
        ],
        scripts: [
            'app.js'
        ],
        less: [
            'app.less'
        ]
    }
 
};
 
initGulpTasks(gulp, taskConfig);

Contributing

I wrote this package because maintaining my build process across multiple packages became a repetitive chore with large margin for error.

Although its quite opinionated, hopefully it will be a useful resource for other package authors. It's got all the nice things I found to component development easy and fun, like a lightning-quick rebuild process with gulp-reload, consolidated publishing, and automated deployment to github pages.

Please let me know if you think anything could be done better or you'd like to see a feature added. Issues and PR's welcome.