Grunt Backbone front-end boilerplat

Repository for frontend development with RequireJS, including Javascript, Backbone, RespondJS, HTML, Handlebars, SASS, Compass and assets. The frontend can be automatically built and optimized with grunt tasks.

Principle

• The development/ directory contains application code and assets
• The deploy/ directory contains the built application
• Gruntfile.js configures the tasks to build and optimize the assets
• package.json contains all NPM dependencies
• Gemfile + Gemfile.lock contains configuration settings for Compass

Installing

Prerequisites for installing the build tools are

• nodejs (for grunt build environment)
• ruby (for compiling SASS into CSS)

Ruby is present by default on Mac OS X. On most linux distros, it is either installed or available as a package. Check 'ruby -v' to see if it is installed (version 1.8.7 or 1.9.3 should work fine). Once ruby is installed, run the following command to install the dependencies: 'gem install bundler && bundle install'

Setting up GruntJS

• Install NodeJS globally
• Install Sass & Compass gem: (sudo) gem update --system && gem install compass
• Drag project folder in terminal and
• Install Grunt locally (project folder): (sudo) npm install grunt
• Install Grunt-CLI locally (project folder): (sudo) npm install -g grunt-cli
• Install dependencies locally (project folder): (sudo) npm install

Common tasks

• Drag project folder in terminal and use
• 'grunt server' to start a web server that automatically compiles on the fly (runs on port 9000)
• 'grunt build' to build a production-ready application in the deploy/ folder