Usage

Configuring using a Brewfile

A Brewfile is a file that sits at the root folder of your project, named, well, "Brewfile", which syntax is plain Coffeescript. It is used to specify the structure of the project to Brewer.js, so it knows what to do when you tell it to make, watch or clean.

Packages

At the top-level of the Brewfile, the following functions are available :

Those two functions can be used interchangeably with js or css to be more concise. The package_name is used to identify certain parts of a project, in case you would like to run $ brake make package_name. A Package is a conceptual component of a project in which you can define bundles and in which files can import each other. A file contained in a package can really be anywhere on the file system -- a package is not bound to a specific directory.

Package can receive options, which can be specified in one of two ways :

The build option specifies where to put bundles aggregated from source files, and compress … well, I think you can guess that one.

@options is a method available in the package definition body, that specifies additional options for the package. Another such method is @bundles(bundle1, bundle2, ...) which specifies file names for bundles in the package (see Bundles below). These two methods are prefixed with a @, meaning that they are members of the package body context. Other methods of this kind are available, such as those to define Sources in a package.

Sources

Sources represent a folder on the file system, where files can be found. One or many can exist within a package, providing it with files to compile, bundle and compress. A source can be of one of many available types : coffeescript (or icedcoffeescript), javascript, css, less or stylus. One restriction about this source type is that a package can only contain sources that are either of its own type, or that can be compiled into its own type (remember a package also have a type).

Now for a real-world example, so we don't get lost too quickly. Say we want to make a cool looking website using jQuery, Bootstrap and Chosen. Each of these libraries have their own source files, of different types and we want to manage all of that neatly. Here is the directory structure :

So there are files that ends up as javascript and those that ends up as css. Let's write a Brewfile that takes this structure into account.

So what we're looking at now is a package for javascripts that looks for coffeescript files in ./coffee, as well as for javascript files in ./vendor, ./vendor/chosen and ./vendor/bootstrap/js. Now let's look at what a bundle would look like :

If we had been running brake watch while we wrote that script and saved it, we would have seen a file appear, named ./js/home.js, containing an aggregate file of jquery, chosen and our little script compiled into javascript. Since we didn't provide the output option, a compiled javascript version of just coffee/home.coffee can be found in ./_cache. If we wanted it to appear somewhere more meaningful, we could set the output option on a source directive. A more complete example of the above could be :

This dedicates a directory ./build, to contain files that would be deployed, and all source files in separate directories. You may have noticed we used @css and @js names to mean stylesheets and javascript respectively. As we said earlier, those are drop-in replacements.

Command-line interface

The command-line interface for brewer provides a few methods to manage your asset project:

• $ brake init [<template_name>]

  This command tells brewer to make a Brewfile in the current directory, according to the template provided, and make an initial directory structure to support the project.

• $ brake [all|<package>*]

  This command tells brewer to look for files to compile (coffeescript, less, etc.) into their javascript or css counterparts, product bundles and compress them if necessary. This intelligently selects only the tasks that needs to be done, skipping files that haven't change.

• $ brake clean [<package>*]

  This command tells brewer to delete files that strongly depends on source files, such as those that are completely derived from the compilation of another file, bundles and their compressed counterparts.

• $ brake watch

  This command tells brewer to first run `brake all` on the current directory and watch for changes (file content change, new files, moved files or deleted files).

• $ brake install

  This command tells Brewer.js to install all missing Node.js modules that it needs to work properly with the current project. For instance, had I put a few @coffeescript source directives in the project's Brewfile, Brewer.js will make sure the coffee-script module is available, installing it under its own project directory if not.