A quick personal setup for a laravel site with gulp and assets pipeline

This is a little quickstart for setting up Laravel sites with Gulp asset management (using Sass as the CSS preprocessor).

Check out these sites for individual package documentation:

• http://laravel.com/
• http://gulpjs.com/
• http://sass-lang.com/
• http://rocketeer.autopergamene.eu/
• https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-php-laravel

Step 1. Initiate

Set up a local environment however you prefer e.g. using Vagrant, MAMP, local web server etc.

Step 2. Download and install vendors

$ cd into your project's development directory

$ composer install

Step 3. Set your local environment

Edit bootstrap/start.php

Set your environments e.g.

$env = $app->detectEnvironment(array(

    'local' => array('your-machine.local'),

));

Step 4. Publish AWS config file

The aws-sdk-php-laravel package is only included in the local envirornment.

$ php artisan config:publish aws/aws-sdk-php-laravel

Now set your AWS configuration options in app/config/packages/aws/aws-sdk-php-laravel/config.php

Step 5. Set up Rocketeer

$ php artisan deploy:ignite

This will create deployment configuration files in app/config/packages/anahkiasen/rocketeer/.

You can test your connection config with:

$ php artisan deploy:check

See the notes below: https://github.com/jimhill/laravel-sass-base#rocketeer

Step 6. Install gulp locally

$ npm i gulp

Step 7. Install gulp dependencies

$ npm i -D gulp-util gulp-notify gulp-ruby-sass@v0.5.0 gulp-jshint gulp-concat gulp-uglify gulp-rename gulp-gzip

Step 8. Install "bourbon"

$ gem install bourbon

Then go into app/assets/src/sass and run:

$ bourbon install

Step 9. Setting up your config

Take advantage of Laravel's environment variable files to protected your commited config files.

An example template can be found in the root directory called .env.local.php.tpl.

Simply rename this file to fit your environment, fill in whichever parameters you are going to use and then in the relevant config files e.g. app/config/database.php you can use $_ENV['DB_HOST'] or $_SERVER['DB_HOST'] (dependent on your machine).

Step 10. Set up a user table and seed it

If you wish to get up and running using a user table and seed it with a master user, make sure you have filled out the relevant section in your environment config file in Step 9. Then run:

php artisan migrate:refresh

Ready?

Go to your local domain in your browser...

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Gulp tasks

$ gulp

The default task will watch for changes in the .scss and .js files and process them

$ gulp build

This will run concatenation and minification on the CSS and JS files, gzip them and have them ready for export in the app/assets/dist/version/ directory.

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Rocketeer

If you are having permission problems with Rocketeer you can use acl on your server. Take a look at rocketeers/rocketeer#85 for some tips.

Also If you have separate environment config directories for your laravel application add them to app/config/packages/anahkiasen/rocketeer/remote.php e.g.:

'shared' => array(
	'app/config/staging',
	'{path.storage}/logs',
	'{path.storage}/sessions',
),

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CDN Deployment

Firstly build your assets:

$ gulp build

Then use Artisan to push them to AWS S3 (remember we are using S3 configuration in the local environment only):

$ php artisan cdn:deploy --env=local

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More to come soon...

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Laravel is not included upstream.