scripts-plus

Arbitrary build scripts helper.

Background

I prefer using npm scripts, for defining build tasks, over Gulp, Grunt etc. as no packages need to be installed globally. As well, Gulp and Grunt require using specific wrappers around the tools I want to use. jshint is not good enough, I would also need to require gulp-jshint.

Most build packages provide a nice CLI, which can simply be spawned with conveniently defined default params.

{
  "scripts": {
    "lint": "jshint client/**/*.js",
    "test": "karma start karma.conf.js --browsers Firefox --single-run"
  }
}

An issue can arise with larger apps which have many dependencies and many build scripts.

{
  lint,
  test,
  e2e,
  watch-css,
  watch-js,
  watch-statics,
  watch,
  build-js,
  build,
  deploy,
  release,
  ...
}

This makes the package.json very dense and harder to manage. scripts-plus allows you to break out your npm scripts into a js file, which remains terse and is familiar to Gulp users.

Example

var scripts = require('scripts-plus');
var argv = scripts.argv(); // `node my-scripts.js build --minify` => `args.minify === true`
 
scripts.add('default', ['build']);
scripts.add('build', ['build-js']);
 
scripts.add('build-js', ['lint'], function(done) {
  var args = ['src/index.js'];
  if (argv.minify) {
    args.concat(['|', 'uglifyjs', '-c', '>', 'dist/bundle.js']);
  } else {
    args.concat(['-o', 'dist/bundle.js']);
  }
  scripts.spawn('browserify', args, done);
});
 
...
 
scripts.run();