jsbuild

Build tool for the JS.Packages module system. Consumes manifests and uses the dependency data to build bundles for deployment.

Installation

$ npm install -g jsbuild

Usage

A common setup when using JS.Packages for web development is to include the package loader and your package manifest using script tags, then using JS.require() to load components as you need them.

<script type="text/javascript" src="/js-packages.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="/manifest.js"></script>
 
<script type="text/javascript">
    JS.require('Application', function() {
        // ...
    });
</script> 

In this case manifest.js might contain:

JS.packages(function() { with(this) {
    file('https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.2/jquery.js')
        .provides('jQuery');
 
    file('/app.js')
        .provides('Application')
        .requires('jQuery');
}});

This setup makes it really easy to load the JavaScript modules you need during development, but in production you often benefit from bundling all the JavaScript for a page into a single file.

jsbuild is a command-line program that takes your package manifest and a list of modules you want to use, and will output a single JavaScript file containing those modules and all their dependencies. The modules can come from your local file system or from the web.

You run jsbuild as follows:

$ jsbuild --manifest MANIFEST --root ROOT [OPTIONS] module1 [module2 ...]

The options available are:

• -m, --manifest: the path to your package manifest. If you have several manifests, use -m multiple times.
• -r, --root: the directory containing your application's JavaScript files. Paths in the manifest are resolved relative to this directory.
• -e, --external: unless this option is passed, the build will skip files that come from the web rather than the local filesystem.
• -P, --no-packages: if this is set, the JS.Packages code will not be included in the build. Including it means your JS.require() calls will carry on working.
• -b, --bundles: optional path to bundle definition file (see Organising bundles).
• -o, --output: the type of output required, either code (default) or paths. Using code makes jsbuild output the combined source code, and paths makes it output the paths to the bundled files.
• -d, --directory: a directory to trim from paths output when using -o paths. For example passing -d public/js will make jsbuild output app.js rather than public/js/app.js.

For example to build a bundle to support our application, we can run this command to produce a single script containing JS.Packages, jQuery and Application, since Application depends on jQuery:

$ jsbuild --manifest public/js/manifest.js \
          --root public/js/ \
          --external \
          Application

The resulting script is printed to stdout. Note that jsbuild does not do any minification of the files your provide, it simply locates the required modules and concatenates them. You should deal with minifying the resulting file separately.

Organising bundles

As a project grows, it often becomes likely that you don't want all your modules and their dependencies in one file. Although this minimizes HTTP round-trips, it means the entire bundle must be re-downloaded when any part of it changes. For this reason many people keep stable libraries in one bundle and their more volatile application code in another. jsbuild lets you create such bundles using a simple JSON file.

The file lists a number of bundles, each of which has an include field and an optional exclude field, both of which can be a list or a single item. The include field specifies which objects from the manifest should go into that bundle, while exclude specifies which dependencies should be skipped, usually because they are provided by another bundle you will load separately. Items given to exlude can be object names from the manifest, or other bundle names to exclude everything provided by that bundle and any bundle it depends on.

For example, let's split our files into stable libraries and our application code:

// bundles.json
{
    "libs": {
        "include": [ "jQuery" ]
    },
    "app": {
        "exclude": "libs",
        "include": "Application"
    }
}

We can then pass bundle names instead of object names to jsbuild to create the bundled files. Remember to pass -b bundle.json to tell it where your bundles are stored.

$ jsbuild -m public/js/manifest.js -b bundles.json -r public/js -o paths libs
https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.2/jquery.js

$ jsbuild -m public/js/manifest.js -b bundles.json -r public/js -o paths app
public/js/app.js

If we removed the line "exclude": "libs" from the app bundle, we would instead get this output, where jQuery has been included before our own files:

$ jsbuild -m public/js/manifest.js -b bundles.json -r public/js -o paths app
https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/2.0.2/jquery.js
public/js/app.js

License

(The MIT License)

Copyright (c) 2007-2013 James Coglan

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the 'Software'), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED 'AS IS', WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.