A command line build tool

I built capt to help me build single page apps. Tools like Jammit are great for when you’re working in a rails environment, but I found there weren’t any really good tools for building apps that are standalone, for example couchapps, or standalone javascript apps that use XMPP or access a javascript api.

Imagine you’re building the new twitter interface, capt is designed to build something like that.

Alpha release!

Capt has been under development since November ‘10, but it’s still very alpha, expect things to be missing / broken.

Create app structure

Run capt new project to create a project directory. Capt will creates the necessary files to get you up and running and will download the latest jQuery / backbone.

Compiles .jst templates

You specify what your static html is going to look like as a .jst file, and capt will compile your index.html. You can include the following lines:

<%= project.stylesheetIncludes() %>
<%= project.scriptIncludes() %>

This will include seperate javascript files (in the correct dependency order) in development mode, or compile them all to one minimized file in production mode.

Serves your app

You can start an express-powered webserver on port 4000 using:

capt server

Serves your jamine specs

By default your app will have a /spec/ directory that includes jasmine and an index.jst. When you create new models, you should create a spec for them in /spec/models/ and capt will add them to your spec runner. Run the specs by browsing to http://localhost:4000/spec/.

Manages dependency order and autoloads

Specify files in config.yml. The default config.yml looks like this:

javascripts:
  - 'lib/jquery.js'
  - 'lib/underscore.js'
  - 'lib/backbone.js'
  - 'lib/coffeescript.js'
  - 'lib/less.js'
  - 'app/controllers/*.coffee'
  - 'app/views/**/*.coffee'
  - 'app/models/*.coffee'

stylesheets:
  - 'public/stylesheets/*.less'

specs:
  - 'spec/*/*.coffee'

Add files to each section to specify build order. Files will only be included once. For example:

javascripts:
  - 'app/models/mybaseclass.coffee'
  - 'app/models/*.coffee'

Installation

Installation requires npm, then:

npm install capt