Cobb

Declarative streaming task runner and build tool. Like the love child of Gulp and Make.

Installation

The CLI:

npm install -g cobb

The API:

npm install cobb

Cobbfile

A Cobbfile is a Node module that exports a Cobb task specification. It can be written either in JavaScript, or in any language that compiles to JavaScript via the -r flag.

var tasks = require('cobb').tasks;

module.exports = tasks(function() {
  "%.min.js": this.dep('%.js', function(fileStream) {
    return fileStream.pipe(uglifyTransform);
  }),
  "main.js": function() { return fs.createReadStream('main.js') }
});

Then running cobb main.min.js will output a minified version of main.js. Note that the requirement for the explicit main.js task will go away in a future version. For more information and to report issues on the task system, see Saito's repository. For issues in the streaming build part, have a look at Miles.

Serving

If serve is passed as the first argument to cobb, it starts a development server which treats the Cobbfile as a routes file. So, given the above Cobbfile, cobb serve main.min.js runs a server that responds to GET /main.min.js with the minified JavaScript. Cobb only serves the files that are passed in as positional arguments. This requirement will go away in a future version. To report issues on the development server, head over to Eames.

Philosophy

Cobb is little more than a thin CLI wrapper around Saito, Eames and Miles. Its API is Saito. Eames and Miles are little more than 10 lines each. Small modules doing one thing well, making minimal assumptions about how they're being used. </pretentiousness>

Licence

MIT. © MMXIV Matt Brennan