Front End Broccoli Generator

This Yeoman generator will create a simple Broccoli project that comes setup for front end web development with SASS, Rollup (for javascript module loading), ES6 transpiling using Babel, and QUnit tests with Testem. It also will install Yoga Sass, Font Awesome, and Normalize CSS.

Although no extra packages are installed, each project can easily be migrated to using Vue.js with routing and template compilation. See "Using Vue".

Installing the Generator

yarn global add yo generator-front-end-broccoli

UPGRADE NOTE This Generator has be updated to use yarn to start projects MUCH faster see below for benchmarks.

Creating Projects

To create a project with this generator run:

yo qunit-broccoli

This will ask you for your project name, and a few details to get up and started.

Running the Development Server

Once the project has been created, move into the directory and then run:

yarn start:sass

The Brocfile.js injects live reload into HTML files in the public directory. This command is backed by ember-cli which will fire a reload whenever Broccoli rebuilds any trees.

Building the Project

To build the project into a final production build, run:

yarn build:sass

This will build the project into a dist directory that can be uploaded to services such as Firebase, Surge, or AWS.

Adding New Modules

This Yeoman generator comes equipped with a command to quickly and easily add new modules with setup for unit tests. To create a new module run:

yo qunit-broccoli:module reducers/users

This will create a new file app/reducers/users.js with the following code:

export default function users() {

}

And it will also create a file tests/reducers/users-test.js with the following code:

import users from '../../app/reducers/users';

module('reducers/users', () => {
  test('it exists', (assert) => {
    assert.ok(users, 'users exists');
  });
});

Using Vue

To add Vue.js support to your newly created project run the command:

yarn setup:vue

This will install vue, vue-router, and all required Rollup plugins to support Vue.js development.

Then, uncomment the following lines in Brocfile.js:

• const vue = require('rollup-plugin-vue');
• vue(), (within the plugins array)

Since Vue.js templates use HTML syntax, you will also need to uncomment the lines in .eslintrc.js to load the html plugin.

Client-Side Routing

To allow use of client-side routing, a small change is required in the server/index.js file. Client-Side routing can be enabled by uncommenting the following lines:

app.use((req, res, next) => {
  const acceptHeaders = req.headers.accept || [];
  const hasHTMLHeader = acceptHeaders.indexOf('text/html') !== -1;
  if (hasHTMLHeader) {
    req.serveUrl = '/index.html';
  }
  next();
});

This will redirect any HTML traffic to the public/index.html file if the requested file doesn't exist in the final build output.

Linting SASS

This project comes with SASS Lint support.

To run SASS lint, run the command:

yarn lint:sass

The rules installed beyond the SASS Lint defaults:

• Class Name Format: BEM
• No IDs
• No Important
• Hex Notation: Lowercase
• Indentation: 2 Spaces
• Property Sort Order: SMACSS
  • Box
  • Border
  • Background
  • Text
  • Other

Linting JS

This project comes configured with ESLint support. To run lint for the project run the command:

yarn lint:js

There is also a command for auto fixing most linting errors:

yarn lint:js-fix

Deploying with Surge

To help quickly deploy your project to Surge.sh, there is a setup yarn command.

yarn deploy

To claim your own site, change the my-app.surge.sh to your domain name.

Yarn Benchmarks

This generator makes an incredibly strong starting project and build stack that can be used to make production quality builds out-of-the-box! But, this means a lot of dependancies including ember-cli, Rollup, autoprefixer, lib-sass, Babel, and more.

With all of the dependancies required this project has been taking longer and longer to run. Luckily, yarn has helped this a ton!

Here are some initial benchmarks.

For full transparency these benchmarks were run with the following system and internet connection.

Computer:

Mid 2011 Macbook Air
1.8 GHz Intel Core i7
4 GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Internet

"1Gbps Fibre"
Tested at 120Mbps using http://fast.com

These installs were done on a "warm cache", meaning that I had just created a fresh project with the old qunit-broccoli generator before running these benchmarks. Results may not be as great if you are running after just creating a new project, but you should still see a drastic improvement!

Results

NPM:

yo qunit-broccoli npm-install  96.82s user 32.55s system 58% cpu 3:40.17 total
yo qunit-broccoli npm-install  83.97s user 23.61s system 61% cpu 2:55.85 total

Yarn:

yo qunit-broccoli yarn-test  46.75s user 19.89s system 114% cpu 58.283 total
yo qunit-broccoli yarn-test  60.26s user 26.56s system 91% cpu 1:34.72 total

And for good measure I went ahead and cleaned cache for both NPM and Yarn. Here are those results:

NPM:

yo qunit-broccoli npm-install  94.89s user 26.65s system 45% cpu 4:26.77 total

Yarn:

yo qunit-broccoli yarn-test  68.04s user 31.62s system 121% cpu 1:21.83 total

It was a bit surprising to see that the last yarn install was actually faster than on a warm cache. I think this was because Finder and MacOS Sierra was using a lot of CPU resources.

Still, there's a drastic improvement!!!