Sample Cakefile
Cake is the build tool for CoffeeScript. It's nifty, but the documentation is a little sparse. Here's an example Cakefile that does everything you need for a basic Coffee project:
Project Structure
In this example, I'm using a project structure something like this:
That's all inside a "static" directory in a Django project, but it shouldn't matter what kind of server you're using. Coffee files are in src/, Jasmine specs are in spec/, and compiled JavaScript goes into bin/.
Dependencies
To run everything, you'll need Node (which you should have already if you're using CoffeeScript) and a few other things installed via npm:
- stitch
- uglifyjs
- jasmine-node
You can run npm install -g <NAME> to intall each of these system-wide.
Cake Tasks
Cakefiles are composed of tasks, which are defined at the top of the Cakefile like this:
Each of these tasks calls a function that performs the correct action. For example, the "compile" task calls this function:
The reason I break the tasks out into functions like this is to make it easy to chain them together. Because Node runs processes asynchronously, I use callbacks in the functions instead of simply calling a sequence of tasks. If I just used "invoke", the full build would happen even if a Jasmine spec fails. Also, I just really like the way the full build task looks:
Developing with Cake
Running cake with no arguments yields a list of tasks defined in the Cakefile.
Each step of the build has its own task, but I really only use three of them on a regular basis:
- While coding, cake test lets me easily run Jasmine specs without waiting for compilation of CoffeeScript.
- While testing small UI tweaks, cake develop lets me package things quickly for running in the browser without waiting for Uglify or Jasmine.
- When I'm ready to deploy, cake build runs all the steps.
