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Should Npm Really Be Used as a Built Tool?

• noir_lord 10y ago
  Good article, I got so annoyed with all the churn in build tools for client side I eschewed them all and just use Python with Envoy to run them as command line tools. NPM brings in the packages and I use browserify for handling require but again from the cli not via grunt/gulp It gives me near endless flexibility, the python code is often clearer and I can pull in just about anything I need if I need it. ./front.py js --debug ./front.py css --debug ./front.py deploy I also like that the python code to handle tasks is largely self-documenting if you know python. Since they are just python files I can setup filewatchers in intellij and call them when something changes giving me a high degree of automation.
  • mindrun 10y ago
    Awesome idea! Thank you for sharing it :) Haven't worked with Python so far, but it looks pretty straightforward.
    • noir_lord 10y ago
      For that kind of stuff it really is straightforward, Python is a pretty orthogonal language and it has lovely tooling. If you do go that route look into using virtualenv and pip which allows you to 'freeze' requirements into a requirements.txt file. Then on deploy you can just pip install -r requirements Which allows you to install python stuff locally without messing up your global space (it's pretty similar to npm and composer over in PHP land).