runup

Efficient task automation platform for web developers

Runup is a task automation platform specific for front-end web application development with a strong focus on performance. Not being general purpose is a very conscious choice because it allows for more optimization and more useful features for this specific use case.

Overview

• Separation of development and build concerns: optimized for fast feedback during development and high quality during build.
• Define tasks in flows, a powerful and flexible extension mechanism using standard Node.js files.
• No need for countless runup-* plugins to glue things together, in stead writing your own flows and integrating directly with existing tools is easy.
• Assets are processed on demand when your browser requests them and are never saved to disk. Unchanged assets are cached in memory.
• Includes all essential infrastructure you need, working out of the box:
  • Integrated web server
  • Integrated source file watcher
  • Live browser refresh
  • Asset hashing for cache busting
• Lightweight: efficient architecture with carefully chosen and minimal dependencies; starts in around half a second.

Documentation

The wiki contains full documentation and a tutorial.

Install

$ npm install --saveDev runup

You can add --global to install the "binary" globally, but it's usually not necessary as Runup can be easily setup through NPM scripts.

Usage

The best way is via NPM scripts:

// package.json
{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "runup",
    "build": "runup build"
  }
}

Then run one of:

$ npm run dev
$ npm run build

• dev starts Runup in development mode.
• build makes a release build.

You can off course also use the CLI directly:

$ [./node_modules/.bin/]runup [build] 

(The node_modules prefix is not needed with a --global install.)

Finally, you can also use the API.