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Let's Write Code

All the code examples for the youtube series Let's Write Code

Ideas?

If you have any screencast you'd like to see or suggestions, please open an issue here. Thanks!

Dev Setup

Throughout these videos I typically use the same development environment. This is a guide through that development setup.

Dependencies

Rather than copying / pasting script tags into my HTML for 3rd party code, I use npm. The npm command comes with Node.js. When I run npm install jquery, it downloads the 3rd party files into the node_modules/jquery/ folder.

The package.json file can hold those dependencies and versions, so the next time you want to install those files, run npm install in the same folder.

Build Tool

Browserify is a tool that reads your JavaScript source files and files you've installed with npm. Then outputs those files loaded in the correct order to a single bundled file.

You can install the browserify command on your machine with: npm install browserify -g.

To create a bundled file, run browserify index.js -o bundle.js, where index.js is the entry point to all your scripts.

In your index.js file, you can include other files with require('./other.js') or a 3rd party file installed with npm by doing require('jquery').

Once you have generated this bundle.js file, you can add a single script tag in your HTML: <script src="bundle.js"></script> and host those assets like any other HTML, JavaScript and CSS files.

Dev Server

While rapidly developing, running the browserify command every time you make a change in the code can get tedious. Also having to FTP, git push or some other method to deploy the code to a server can slow your development down.

I use a tool called budo which runs a server locally on your machine (http://localhost:9966) and automatically bundles your code with Browserify as you refresh the page or live as you make changes if you have the --live option on.

Install the budo command with: npm install budo and run the server with: budo index.js. Now you can rapidly develop the code by viewing localhost:9966.

For convenience, I add the budo command to the scripts section of my package.json:

{
  "scripts": {
    "start": "budo index.js:bundle.js"
  }
}

Now I only need to run npm start to start developing code.

Deployment

After you're done developing the code, run browserify index.js -o bundle.js to create your JavaScript bundle. Add the script tag to your HTML: <script src="bundle.js"></script> to load that JavaScript file.

Then upload those files to your remote server. Either via FTP/SFTP, git deploying, heroku, firebase or whatever method you normally use to deploy your website.