Suggest to include build task in deploy task, and use dist files in index.html of gh-pages branch

[liuwenchao]

I'm keeping forgot to build before running deploy, and it's worse when I made a release w/o knowing the dist files are not updated.

[sindresorhus]

👍

[zenorocha]

Hey @liuwenchao,

Actually, you don't need to run the build before running deploy because the index.html uses the HTML file under src folder: https://github.com/webcomponents/polymer-boilerplate/blob/master/index.html#L11

You only need to build it before releasing a new git tag.

Thanks for the feedback!

[liuwenchao]

@zenorocha you're right, shouldn't the index.html use dist files? That's what real users will use.

[zenorocha]

If we do that, you'll need to run grunt build whenever you change the element.

Both suck, but at least you just need to build it before launching a new version and the development process gets a little bit smoother.

There was an intense debate about this at #11

[liuwenchao]

Both suck, but one of them looks logically correct:

1. master branch is provided as development environment, where index.html should link to source files. Developers just need to run: grunt server once, and keep looping though editing, saving, testing.
2. gh-pages branch is provided as production environment, where developers usually just verify after deployment. It's just a demonstration page and is targeting end user. So it should looks exactly like what the end users will use in their projects, which means index.html here should link to built/dist files.

If this makes sense, I should change the title to: Suggest to include build task in deploy task, and use dist files in index.html of gh-pages branch.

[zenorocha]

It does make sense @liuwenchao, however we'll need to introduce one more task to replace the <link rel="import" href="src/my-element.html"> value in index.html file and then put the original value back when going to the master branch.

[zenorocha]

Issue name changed.

[zenorocha]

The new release leverages polyserve which should mitigate this problem.

[liuwenchao]

Does that mean we lose feature: 'check it live'?

[zenorocha]

@liuwenchao it doesn't. You'll still be able to see it live in gh-pages branch but you'll need a different code base for that which consists in a bower.json file to grab dependencies and a index.html that redirects to the demo.

Check: https://github.com/webcomponents/hello-world-polymer/tree/gh-pages

It's less automated indeed but at least we don't introduce any additional tool.

Do you think we should have should branch here as well?

[liuwenchao]

Yes I think it will be helpful, the gulp task should be simpler than before, I can work on this gulpfile task if you think it makes sense, however gulpfile is removed; Another option is simply provide the gh-pages branch here similar to hello-world-polymer, I believe most of developers understand how to use it. They can clone the gh-pages branch as the start point.