@abcnews/aunty

A toolkit for working with ABC News projects

Installation

To use the CLI to create new projects, install the latest aunty release globally:

npm install --global @abcnews/aunty

Projects based on aunty's project templates already have aunty listed as a local dependency, locked to the version used to create it.

Usage

For usage instructions, run aunty with no arguments, or for details on specific commands, run:

aunty help <command>

The CLI contains four types of command, grouped by purpose:

• Creating new projects (new, init)
• Generating stuff (generate) like components
• Developing projects (clean, build, serve, test)
• Deploying (un)versioned projects (deploy, release)

Starting projects

When creating new projects, you should be using the global aunty:

/some/parent/directory $ aunty new

or, from within a (preferably empty) directory:

/some/parent/directory/my-project $ aunty init

Developing projects

When working inside a project directory that has the aunty dependency installed, you'll automatically be running that local aunty:

/some/parent/directory/my-project $ aunty <build|serve|...> [options]

This ensures that any changes to future versions of aunty won't impact your project, and you can manually update the local aunty when you're ready to accommodate those changes.

Project-level commands can use an optional configuration, which you can either export from a project-level aunty.config.js file:

module.exports = {
  type: '<project_type>',
  // aunty command configuration
  build: {…},
  serve: {…},
  deploy: [{…}],
  // internal tools configuration
  babel: {…},
  jest: {…},
  webpack: {…},
  webpackDevServer: {…}
};

...or add to your package.json file as an aunty property:

"aunty": {
  "type": "<project_type>",
  "build": {…},
  "serve": {…},
  "deploy": [{…}],
  "babel": {…},
  "jest": {…},
  "webpack": {…},
  "webpackDevServer": {…}
}

Supported project types (currently: basic, preact, react & svelte) have their own default build configuration, but you can override it by extending your project configuration.

The build, serve and deploy properties allow you to override the default settings for those respective commands. Their respective properties (and default values) are documented below.

Aunty uses some tools internally, which you can also provide custom configuration for. If you supply an object for the babel, jest, webpack, and/or webpackDevServer properties, that object will be merged into the default configuration. Optionally, you can supply a function (for any property), which will be passed the default configuration for you to manually modify and return.

If you're looking to see what the default configuration is for any command (and their internal tools), or the impact of your additions, you can always perform a dry run of the command by using the --dry (or -d) flag:

/some/parent/directory/my-project $ aunty serve --dry

Overrides should be used sparingly, as the advantages of using a single-dependency toolkit are most apparent when we don't deviate far from the defaults.

If you don't need to override any of the project defaults, your entire aunty configuration can be a string containing the project type, as a shorthand for {type: "<project_type>"}. type is the only required property in your aunty configuration.

build config properties

property	default	description
entry	"index"	The entry file for your project (extension should be unspecified). You can optionally supply an array for multiple entry points, which will result in multiple outputs.
from	"src"	The source directory that aunty will look for your entry file(s) in.
to	".aunty/build"	The destination directory for your compiled and static assets.
staticDir	"public"	The directory you store static assets in. You can optionally supply an array of directories, which will be merged at build time.
addModernJS	false	Setting this to true will enable a 2nd output file for each entry file named {name}.modern.js, which is skips browserlist-based feature polyfilling
includedDependencies	[]	Any packages (defined by name string or name-matching RegExps) you add to this array will be transpiled in the same manner as the project source.
extractCSS	false	Setting this to true will create a separate {name}.css output for each input, rather than bundling it with the JS (for dynamic <style> insertion).
useCSSModules	true	Setting this to false will turn off CSS module compilation. All styles written will be 'global', and importing CSS files will not give you an object of className references.
showDeprecations	false	Setting this to true will allow NodeJS to output stack traces of deprecation warnings.

serve config properties

property	default	description
hasBundleAnalysis	false	Setting this to true will spin up a second server on another port, allowing you to inspect your bundle. The address will be logged to the console when the dev server starts.
host	"localhost"	The hostname of your dev server. If you're on the ABC internal network, the default will change to your machine's hostname (ws<number>.aus.aunty.abc.net.au). The AUNTY_HOST environment variable, if present, will override this setting.
hot	true	Should the dev server enable hot reloading. If NODE_ENV !== "development", the default will change to false.
https	true	Should the dev server use SSL (with a self-signed certificate matching the host). You can alternatively supply your own {cert: string, key: string} object if you've generated your certificate some other way.
port	8000	The port number of your dev server. If the port specified is unavailable, aunty will try incrementing the port number until it finds an available one. The AUNTY_PORT environment variable, if present, will override this setting.

deploy config properties

deploy should be an array of config objects, one for each deployment target (e.g. ContentFTP)

property	default	description
from	build config to value	The directory to deploy files from (if you haven't overridden the build to value, it should be ".aunty/build")
files	"**"	A glob matching the files under your from directory to deploy
profile	"contentftp"	This should be the name of a key in your ~/.abc-credentials file, which will be consulted to populate login credentials. If this is "contentftp" it will also populate the config's to and resolvePublicPath properties.
publicPath	"/"	If resolvePublicPath is defined, publicPath will be overwritten by the return value of that function.
resolvePublicPath	undefined	A function which takes the initial config as an object, and returns an updated publicPath. If profile="contentftp", this will be a function that knows how ContentFTP directories map onto ABC URLs.
to	undefined	The directory on your target to deploy files to. If profile="contentftp" , this will be a versioned directory where we deploy News projects to. If you set this to a string, the patterns <name> and <id> will be replaced by the project name, and the current deployment ID, respectively. During releases, id is the current version; during development, it's the current git branch name. You can also specify a custom deployment ID by using the --id flag when running aunty build.

You could also specify type ("ftp"/"ssh"), host, port, username & password, but these are best left inside your .abc-credentials file.

Generators

Aunty comes with a few basic generators. Run aunty generate --help for the full list, or aunty generate <generator> --help for further details.

Authors

• Colin Gourlay
• Simon Elvery ([e-mail])
• Joshua Byrd ([e-mail])
• Nathan Hoad

Thanks

This project was originally inspired by nwb, a React/Preact/Inferno toolkit by Jonny Buchanan. If you're looking to develop your own toolkit, Jonny's created a fantastic guide to get you started.