Heads up! To view this whole video, sign in with your Courses account or enroll in your free 7-day trial. Sign In Enroll
Well done!
You have completed Using npm as a Task Runner!
You have completed Using npm as a Task Runner!
Preview
In this video we'll take a brief overview to on task running with npm.
Download the project files to follow along with this workshop
Related Discussions
Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.
Sign upRelated Discussions
Have questions about this video? Start a discussion with the community and Treehouse staff.
Sign up
[SOUND] Hello there, I'm Andrew, and
0:00
welcome to this workshop on
using npm as a task runner.
0:04
A task is something that you need to do.
0:10
If you want to perform that task over and
over again,
0:13
you'll save yourself a lot of time
if you alternate the process.
0:16
Common web development tests
include running test suites.
0:20
Compiling SaaS, TypeScript and
CoffeeScript files.
0:23
Downloading assets of files from an
external source that your package needs.
0:26
Starting a web server.
0:31
And starting a worker that
goes through a queue of jobs,
0:33
like sending out emails or
push notifications.
0:36
Popular jump script build tools like grunt
and group are good for complex projects.
0:40
But you don't always need that power or
0:46
want to bother with the time consuming
set up process that they require.
0:48
You can always turn to
a full feature build system
0:53
later as your project evolves.
0:56
npm tests are called scripts, and
0:59
they're added to the scripts property
of a project's package.json file.
1:01
Tasks have a name and a command,
which is simply a string that's
1:07
executed on the operating system's
command line when the task is run.
1:11
For example, you could echo out a message
to the terminal, start up a web server,
1:16
or use a command line like mv to
move files, or cp to copy files.
1:22
I'll show you a few examples in a moment.
1:28
Once you have the script added to the
package.json file, you can run it simply
1:32
by typing npm run, the name of the script
in your computer's command line tool.
1:36
For example, if you had a task named test,
you'd run it by typing npm run test.
1:43
Or if I had a script named compile,
that compiles CSS files,
1:51
I'd run it with npm run compile.
1:55
I'll focus on two types of task with MPM.
1:59
Default, or built-in tasks,
and arbitrary tasks.
2:01
Built-in tasks are those that
are common to most projects.
2:06
An example of a built-in task is "test".
2:11
Built-in tasks do not
require the run command.
2:14
So npm run test can also
be ran as npm test.
2:18
That saves a couple of keystrokes
every time you want to run your tests.
2:24
Arbitrary tasks are those
that you can name yourself.
2:28
They require npm’s run command.
2:32
Since there's no built-in compile task,
if you added your own
2:35
script with that name,
you'd read it like this, npm run compile.
2:40
Not all JavaScript applications will need
custom or arbitrary tasks like this,
2:46
since the built-in task cover many
of the most common situations.
2:52
Here's the simple project
we're building in this video.
2:56
Dice Simulator 2015 is the latest craze.
3:00
You click the button and
it rolls the dice.
3:03
This project is a front end project.
3:06
When I say we'll be building this, I don't
mean that we'll be programming this.
3:09
All the programming has been done, but
3:14
we'll be getting the project
ready to deploy.
3:16
Open up the associated work space
with this video and we'll get going.
3:19
Let's take a look at the start
point of this project.
3:24
We have a srcc folder or source folder.
3:27
A test folder, with a simple test for
this application.
3:31
And we can use npm's built
in test task for this.
3:36
Let's jump in quickly to the package.json
file and see what's going on in there.
3:40
We'll be using Mocha as
our test library and
3:47
UglifyJs to combine our JavaScript
files into one app.js file.
3:50
The scripts object has a test task.
3:56
If you don't specify your test, it prints
out, Error: no test specified, and
4:00
it exits with a 1,
meaning something went wrong.
4:05
Computer programs successfully
run exits with the code of 0.
4:08
The thing that's wrong here,
is that we have no test set up.
4:14
We'll do that in the next video.
4:18
You need to sign up for Treehouse in order to download course files.
Sign upYou need to sign up for Treehouse in order to set up Workspace
Sign up