3 ms·

Having used gulp and grunt, I just use shell scripts now. Why bother?

• keedot 11y ago
  Ideally, as a means of abstracting and controlling changes between your build and deploy steps and the third party tooling. Bash scripts are either too fragile for sufficiently complex applications, and therefore unlikely to be reusable. Additionally, if the script is sufficiently complex, then you have an additional complex component that you have to maintain yourself. For many projects, this is a non-issue, but for others, it can be quite the ordeal.
  • Sanddancer 11y ago
    Who said anything about bash scripts? There are other shell scripts in the sea. Also, shell scripting is much more universal, so you can use the same infrastructure to manage your web servers, your database servers, etc. A language-specific build system means that when you need to start adding components made in other languages, you need to reinvent a lot more tooling that should have been universal to begin with.
    • madeofpalk 11y ago
      > Who said anything about bash scripts? There are other shell scripts in the sea. Also, shell scripting is much more universal[...] I guess it depends a lot on your infra, but wouldn't (ba)sh be the most universal shell? so if shell = bash, then "shell script" = "bash script"
      • webromance 11y ago
        It would. I use fish shell here, yet I prefer writing my build tasks with plain JavaScript. Fly seems to be a thin abstraction to accomplish the same. Now, the most striking advantage is support for generators/co-routine style for async stuff and also promises right from the get go.
• espadrine 11y ago
  Sometimes, the hassle of allowing developers to work on it from Windows is worth the grunts. Also, plugins. Arguably, shell scripts are also a plugin ecosystem. Perhaps a less convenient one, it's hard to say from my perspective. It's definitely hard to find versionned coffeescript bash files. That said, wouldn't it be wonderful if Windows had bash built-in?
  • skrebbel 11y ago
    Every Windows developer who has git also has bash installed. Because of that, most simple .sh build scripts tend to work fine on Windows these days.
• bucaran 11y ago
  Because shell scripts are more complex to write. I, myself, having used grunt and then switched to gulp, ended up favoring shell scripts / npm scripts, only to realize gets much more complex for larger projects. I think a build system abstraction is legit, and Fly is pushing the status quo to an even simpler, thinner, yet flexible alternative.