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At Mozilla's PDF.js, we looked at several build alternatives in 2011. The main problem was that they all required a learning curve (they all looked like a domai

At Mozilla's PDF.js, we looked at several build alternatives in 2011. The main problem was that they all required a learning curve (they all looked like a domain-specific language), and sometimes they were too limited for our needs. Since we already did everything through Makefiles, what we wanted was a shell script/Make that worked out of the box in all platforms (Windows included). So we wrote ShellJS for Node.js: https://github.com/arturadib/shelljs https://github.com/arturadib/shelljs It is now battle-tested in several Mozilla projects (PDF.js, Firefox OS, Butter.js, etc). Check it out, happy to answer questions/comments at @arturadib.

ben_alman 14y ago
ShellJS is awesome. It's basically Unix shell commands for Node.js, which is excellent if you want to write a makefile equivalent in JavaScript. If, on the other hand, you want to execute web developer-centric tasks like concatenation and minification, linting, running of unit tests in pure JavaScript or a headless WebKit instance, or any of the functionality the 90+ plugins I'm aware of provide, check grunt out. Grunt also works on all platforms, and supports completely arbitrary JavaScript tasks. If you can write it, grunt will execute it. And because grunt supports arbitrary JavaScript tasks, you can use ShellJS (or any other JavaScript) from within grunt.
ricardobeat 14y ago
I created a build tool for similar reasons, difference being that it's aimed at Cakefile users. It's goal is to be as simples as possible, support common tasks out of the box (minifying, compiling LESS/coffee/etc) and should work on Windows too: http://github.com/ricardobeat/cake-flour http://github.com/ricardobeat/cake-flour I could see shelljs as a stand-alone executable using JSDB (http://jsdb.org http://jsdb.org) too, should be an easy port, cross-platform, much smaller and dependency-free.

ben_alman 14y ago

ShellJS is awesome. It's basically Unix shell commands for Node.js, which is excellent if you want to write a makefile equivalent in JavaScript. If, on the other hand, you want to execute web developer-centric tasks like concatenation and minification, linting, running of unit tests in pure JavaScript or a headless WebKit instance, or any of the functionality the 90+ plugins I'm aware of provide, check grunt out. Grunt also works on all platforms, and supports completely arbitrary JavaScript tasks. If you can write it, grunt will execute it. And because grunt supports arbitrary JavaScript tasks, you can use ShellJS (or any other JavaScript) from within grunt.

ricardobeat 14y ago

I created a build tool for similar reasons, difference being that it's aimed at Cakefile users. It's goal is to be as simples as possible, support common tasks out of the box (minifying, compiling LESS/coffee/etc) and should work on Windows too: http://github.com/ricardobeat/cake-flour http://github.com/ricardobeat/cake-flour I could see shelljs as a stand-alone executable using JSDB (http://jsdb.org http://jsdb.org) too, should be an easy port, cross-platform, much smaller and dependency-free.