New command: serve about volo

[dmose]

This sounds like a very worthwhile feature to me.

[asciidisco]

Mhh,
i think that this feature doesn´t belong to volo.
I consider to use grunt instead if users rely on that feature.

[wilmoore]

@jrburke Please don't add a generic server to volo. I mean no offense but he following statement, but I personally feel like volo does a ton already. (1) package manager (2) build tool (3) project scaffolding. I really want to open an issue that pleads for you to scale volo back to do just (1). Again, no offense meant (and I hope this doesn't sound like I'm trying to tell you how to run your own project); I am just seeing a tool that is shaping up to be awesome at (1) and I wonder why it also needs to do (2) and (3)? Please dont' add a (4).

[jrburke]

@wilmoore I agree that this does not belong in volo proper, and will close out this ticket. I also appreciate the feedback.

For me, the (3) project scaffolding, by which I think you mean volo create, seems to fit with the package manager part -- it just happens to pull down a zip file of a project, instead of a dependency. It uses the same github IDs to do so.

I am receptive about trying to reduce the scope for (2) build tool. I am not sure how to do that yet. I still feel like there needs to be something to make doing simple coding of a project action easier to do in node, something that does not result in needing to download a bunch of code from npm for each task that needs it. The onCreate and onAdd hooks for volofiles in volo add and volo create seem useful too. Maybe that just argues for something like npm's "scripts" support in volo though instead.

But this is best discussed in a separate issue. I will close this issue down though as out of scope. It should be enough to just point people on the volojs web site on what to install to get this capability.

[wilmoore]

...volo create, seems to fit with the package manager part -- it just happens to pull down a zip file of a project

I think I can get behind this as "extra sugar". Perhaps the build tool addition made this feature look worse than it really is.

[wilmoore]

Maybe that just argues for something like npm's "scripts" support in volo though instead.

I'm not too keen on NPM taking on this responsibility either. I think people accept it for some reason, but I don't think it's a super idea.

Grunt (and others) do a fine job of just being a build tool and allowing you to add plugins. I was going to say that I see a grunt volo plugin making sense, but then I just found that there is one: https://npmjs.org/package/grunt-volo.

I tend to use a makefile, but I can see myself using grunt going forward for front-end projects.

[jrburke]

On the npm "scripts" thing, I meant more that it may make sense for volo to have a similar feature, not to rely on npm directly.

For me, grunt introduces an unnecessary adapter layer, more about this in volo-and-grunt. Makefiles are nice, just hard to use on Windows. Maybe doing something like shelljs is enough. Still feeling that out though.

[wilmoore]

So it sounds like it is feasible that one could use a volofile solely for the purpose of creating a project template? Does that mean that I can use volo create to initialize a project and not have that volofile sitting in the derived project directory?

[jrburke]

Yes, in the project template's volofile's onCreate, it can decide to just delete the volofile when done: v.rm('volofile').

[wilmoore]

Cool...works for me :)