Kremlin
A lean-and-mean Webpack alternative for development
Kremlin is supposed to be a zero-config, easy to use webapp builder and bundler for JavaScript and TypeScript. It continues the tradition of Browserify, Webpack, RollupJS, and Parcel. It strives to uphold the following ideals:
- Require no configuration at all in almost all cases.
- Provide full transparency of what is being bundled.
- Generate code that is easy to debug.
- Maintain a clean, simple design to allow users to tweak it.
Not all of the above has been achieved at this point. But it's good to have goals
Build
At the moment, there is no NPM package for Kremlin (although one is definitely planned). To use Kremlin, you first have to clone the repo and build it:
% git clone https://github.com/corwin-of-amber/Web.Kremlin.git kremlin
% cd kremlin
% npm i
% npm run bootstrap
Needless to say, Kremlin is built with Kremlin. The bootstrap phase is used
to compile the TypeScript sources so that they can be run (with Node) in order
to build and bundle the base CLI.
After bootstrap, you can rebuild with npm run build. If you happen to break something, leading to Kremlin not being able to build itself anymore, you can always npm run bootstrap again.
To make the Kremlin CLI available for use in your project, it is recommended to link it globally:
% npm link
Use
To build a project whose main file is HTML:
% kremlin index.html
That's it! Kremlin will crawl the dependencies and generate a development build in build/kremlin.
There are a few command-line options (try kremlin --help):
| Flag | Description |
|---|---|
-w / --watch
|
Keep running and recompile whenever files in the current directory change. |
-p / --prod
|
Generate a production build — force concatenation of all the .js files into a single bundle. |
--node |
Generate a bundle that runs in Node.js (only for a .js entry point). |