Stripped-down Node/Express/Gulp app to quickly get up and running

Using this to start a new project

Do a shallow clone of this repo

git clone --depth=1 git@github.com:kjs3/node-express-bootstrap.git

Remove the .git directory so it's not a repo anymore

cd node-express-bootstrap
rm -rf .git

Reinitialize a git repo to something else

Remove node_modules and bower_components from .gitignore if you want to track those.

… and you're on you're way.

Getting up and running

npm install -g gulp bower
npm install
bower install
gulp

Start development server with live-reload

This starts a live-reload server that should automatically reload the page on css/js changes.

start production server

Notes

Gulpfile has cache-bust task that takes scss and js files from the assets directory, processes them (adding a fingerprint), and puts the result in the public directory.

The Express route uses a library to get those fingerprinted filenames from ./cache-bust.json and store them in jsSrc and cssSrc variables. These vars are then used in the Jade template link tags to link to the fingerprinted file.

This process happens automatically with the gulp watch task.

Running on Heroku?

A Gulp task and Procfile are included for deploying/running on Heroku.

Add the following config vars to your app

BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/timdp/heroku-buildpack-nodejs-gulp.git
NODE_ENV=production
npm_config_production=false

When you push to Heroku the 'heroku:production' Gulp task will be run which in turn just runs the 'cache-bust' task that fingerprints css/js files.