Updates to Pinax Starter Projects

We switched our frontend build tools as well as made some per project updates as well as updated the Pinax command line interface to fix a namespace issue.

Starter Project Updates

Back in August we announced a move to webpack while this was the right direction, we ran into friction using webpack as a tool. We switched to gulp plus browserify instead mainly because of the transparency and control of the build procress that we gain from gulp. But also, and maybe more important depending on what you are spending more of your time on, the rebuilds when running npm run watch is order of magnitudes faster when updating less files than it was using the less-builder with webpack.

We worked to maintain the same operational interface for building static with npm run build and npm run watch, but instead of calling webpack and using the webpack.config.js the scripts are calling gulp using the gulpfile.js.

The configuration that drives everything can be found in gulp/config/index.js and all the gulp tasks that are run can be found in modules under gulp/tasks/*.js. As a result, it’s super easy to customize and debug.

We also made some minor updates to versions of some different requirements like Django and DUA, but the primary 2.0.0 release bump on our starter projects was this build process switch.

Pinax Command Line Interface

There was a known issue with the installed command line interface that made it so that if you installed any other Pinax.* packages, the CLI’s module, pinax.py was clobbered and would not run anymore. This was fixed and pinax-cli==0.5 was released.

Tags

pinax-cli pinax-starter-projects