Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By : Daniel Li
Book Image

Building Enterprise JavaScript Applications

By: Daniel Li

Overview of this book

With the over-abundance of tools in the JavaScript ecosystem, it's easy to feel lost. Build tools, package managers, loaders, bundlers, linters, compilers, transpilers, typecheckers - how do you make sense of it all? In this book, we will build a simple API and React application from scratch. We begin by setting up our development environment using Git, yarn, Babel, and ESLint. Then, we will use Express, Elasticsearch and JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) to build a stateless API service. For the front-end, we will use React, Redux, and Webpack. A central theme in the book is maintaining code quality. As such, we will enforce a Test-Driven Development (TDD) process using Selenium, Cucumber, Mocha, Sinon, and Istanbul. As we progress through the book, the focus will shift towards automation and infrastructure. You will learn to work with Continuous Integration (CI) servers like Jenkins, deploying services inside Docker containers, and run them on Kubernetes. By following this book, you would gain the skills needed to build robust, production-ready applications.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
Free Chapter
1
The Importance of Good Code
Index

Consolidating commands with npm scripts


It's troublesome to have to type rm -rf dist/ && npx babel src -d dist each time you want to build your project. Instead, we should use npm scripts to consolidate this command into a simpler one.

In your package.json file, add a new build sub-property to the scripts property, and set it to a string representing the command we want to run:

"scripts": {
 "build": "rm -rf dist/ && babel src -d dist",
 "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
}

Now, instead of typing  rm -rf dist/ && npx babel src -d dist, you can just type yarn run build, or npm run build—much less cumbersome! By adding this script into package.json, it allows you to share this with other developers, so everyone can benefit from this convenience.

We can also create a serve script, which will build our application and then run it:

"scripts": {
  "build": "rm -rf dist/ && babel src -d dist",
  "serve": "yarn run build && node dist...