Getting started with PUG

Starter package for pug (former jade) template based projects.

Note: an boolean option config.render.sourceFileChange has been added to the package.json. The behaviour differs based on the value:

1. true - it renders if the source file (pug file) has been changed; This has a much much greater speed when rendering compared to the other option however it's only relevant if you make change to the current file watched by PUG. If you make a change to a file that's extended and resides in a path that contains "_", like a layout one, the change won't be reflected.
2. false - it renders if any pug file has been changed and compares the output with the destination file (the HTML generated now with the previous generated HTML). This can be slower when the number of files increases.

Prerequisites

The project requires NodeJS v.4+ and gulp v4+

To install NodeJS visit nodejs download page

Install gulp v4 globally

$ npm i -g gulp-cli

If you already have gulp v3 or lower installed

$ npm rm -g gulp
$ npm i -g gulp-cli

To verify what version you have installed globally, you can run the below command (and should see a similar output)

$ gulp -v
CLI version 1.2.1

Install gulp 4 locally

Once globally installed, gulp v4 will then need to be installed on a per-project basis.

$ npm rm -D gulp
$ npm i -D gulpjs/gulp.git#4.0

Installation

BEFORE YOU INSTALL: please read the prerequisites

$ npm i

or

$ npm install

Usage

To run the project in development mode and open a local server that synchronizes across multiple devices use:

npm start

or

npm run dev

To build the project for production use:

npm run prod

To automatically deploy your project to GitHub pages and make it available at https://[your-username].github.io/[your-project-name] use:

npm run deploy

Style

The project supports both embed and external style sheets. You can have none, one or the other, or both of them.

Single page application style

When you're building a single page app or website, there is no point in having the style sheets loaded from an external file and I'll explain why: the point of loading external style sheets is to allow the browser to cache those files and once you visit another web page of the same website, instead of making another request(s) for the style sheet file(s) to the server and having to download them, if there is no change, the browser will load them from the local drive. In a single page, there is no other page to go to therefore the external file technique doesn't apply.

Multi page application style

In this scenario you can have either both embed and external or just external. The most common scenario is to have only one external style sheet file to be loaded and most of the time that's just fine.

If you want to improve your SEO and user experience even further, I strongly recommend to use a combination of both embed and external. The embed style sheet should only contain the minimum amount of styles for the initial visible part of the page to render. The rest of the styles can be put in the external CSS file.