Things to do with Gulp & Node

Welcome to expressBuilder

This package is for advanced developers who know their way around task managers and npm, and just want a quick launching point. This builder is also brilliant for new and eager up-starts who are eager for a way to get their foot in the door with useful and worth-while open-sourcey skills, learning how to build and manage scaleable HTML5 JavaScript applications using a terminal, node, and gulp alone.

Its up to you if you need to access files through an IDE as an extra step. Its easy enough to network share the project dir that your building, and edit/build from your IDE across some network. Its just easy. You will have to either skip to the Easy setup section from here, or Read on to continue, depending on your level of patience. Tap-on die-hard coders!

Versatility is key since you never know which direction technology is leading, to which type of application you will build next

Using this builder gives you a way to fully control what type of application, and to help you get it out the door fast. It doesn't matter what tools you want to choose from to do the job. Using npm only is encouraged. This is an anti-bower-need, anti-grunt-need setup to keep things really slim. Any projects GitHub repo URL can simply be added into the gulp task, called "vendor", whether its a RUBY / readthis app, a raw bare-bones framework that your creating in any design pattern, or an Angular/Redux masterpiece, this is a great launching point.

Examples aim to help you rapid start a mainstream HTML5 application

Kick off right away with a working site, with CRUD. The main example uses Express/Mongo with MongooseODM. The site includes a database, with a RESTful API/CRUD.

Live reload

One of the primary features that is core to continue to function flawlessly on all builds of expressBuilder is Live reload. Live reload is integrated into gulp-live-server so that a watch can be set both on the src build files, and again on the build dir so that after they are compiled they can come up on save (less than a second on all devices). This is superb when your developing RWD, CSS and TEMPLATE authoring, even client and server-side js. This takes efffect on every device/browser opened on the LAN, in a second, by the press of save on your IDE, or :w on vim. This works without browser extensions allowing you to immediately reap from any browsing device.

Easy setup

git clone into your projects dir onto a machine that has a working nodejs installation configured and ready to run npm (can be through a terminal, so long as the port for node is available, currently that is port 3003, you can change it)
cd to the app root dir, run npm install

First steps for orientation

run gulp all
open any device browsers, browse to url (http://ip:port) where your running gulp, e.g. (http://192.168.1.6:3003) or (http://sharedhosting.com:3001) etc..
see that the application loads, be excited to test Live Reload working next!

First steps for development

branch the app, so you can start development
cd to the app dir, gulp all(reducing to gulp) until you get a clean output and browser refresh, then commit these core changes
Peek and orient yourself with the client-side source files
- cd to the src/ see models/controllers/views
- Edit and save a file, watch gulp, and device output. (adjust any gulp tasks to your likings)
- This is the amazing part, watch your page come back to life right away as the gulp task brings it back online. The application automatically reaches back out to its mother-ship on all devices that still have it loaded!!
Peek at the middle-ware index.js file in the app root which bootstraps the app
Peek at the back end node server in bin/

expressBuilder

A bleeding-edge "Big Picture" application starter and manager