
Should Npm Really Be Used as a Built Tool? - mindrun
https://medium.com/@leo/should-npm-really-be-used-as-a-built-tool-e8ff4f6cbcef#.5qrr8gjw5
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noir_lord
Good article, I got so annoyed with all the churn in build tools for client
side I eschewed them all and just use Python with Envoy to run them as command
line tools.

NPM brings in the packages and I use browserify for handling require but again
from the cli not via grunt/gulp

It gives me near endless flexibility, the python code is often clearer and I
can pull in just about anything I need if I need it.

    
    
        ./front.py js --debug
        ./front.py css --debug
        ./front.py deploy
    

I also like that the python code to handle tasks is largely self-documenting
if you know python.

Since they are just python files I can setup filewatchers in intellij and call
them when something changes giving me a high degree of automation.

~~~
mindrun
Awesome idea! Thank you for sharing it :) Haven't worked with Python so far,
but it looks pretty straightforward.

~~~
noir_lord
For that kind of stuff it really is straightforward, Python is a pretty
orthogonal language and it has lovely tooling.

If you do go that route look into using virtualenv and pip which allows you to
'freeze' requirements into a requirements.txt file.

Then on deploy you can just

    
    
        pip install -r requirements
    

Which allows you to install python stuff locally without messing up your
global space (it's pretty similar to npm and composer over in PHP land).

