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David Fahlander edited this page Jan 18, 2017 · 2 revisions

just-build is a simple task runner that doesn't bloat your npm package.

Features

  • Define build tasks within package.json - no config files needed.
  • Can run commands sequencially or in parallell.
  • Can invoke --watch flags to any binary that supports it. Incrementially executes all trailing commands whenever a --watch command emits certain strings to the console.

Why

npm scripts in package.json are great but they do not support --watch. I personally needed custom build steps, that would have easily solved with npm scripts (or a bash script) if it wasn't for the lack of --watch support. Incremential builds are so essential for the development of any library. Contributors must be able to npm link and npm run watch with ease if it should be possible to maintain a library. So I was using custom javascripts-based build scripts for a while, until I found them start becoming a hard-to-maintain part of my lib. That's when I decided that I do not want complex build systems at all.

What about Grunt and Gulp then? To be honest, I was drowning in issues while googling about using rollupjs with Gulp. And I feel a little scared that Gulp or Grunt would put me into situations where a certain version of tsc, rollup, babel or whatever, hasn't got a corresponding up-to-date gulp-plugin.

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