ryanvarick.com

My website, ryanvarick.com, is currently powered by PmWiki. This is its current skin, the 16th major version since 1998. Eventually I would like to migrate to a Markdown-based wiki like Jingo.

Installation

Create a directory, then clone locally. Run:

npm install

Update experimental symlink to local directory. To go live, increment the version number in package.json and run:

npm run deploy

This will automatically package up the skin and copy it to the server. PmWiki will load whatever stable symlinks to.

Usage

I dig npm scripts. The more I can do without Grunt or Gulp or whatever, the better.

• npm run dev - Run live reload, watch for changes, start up a static asset server, and include development scripts
• npm run dev:watch - Like npm run dev, but without the server (useful when running a separate PHP server)
• npm run deploy - Deploy the current skin

I don't really like dealing with Bower or NPM either, so here are a few utilities related to them:

• npm run version - Sync package.json version number to bower.json
• npm run postinstall - Automatically run bower install after npm install
• npm run clean:packages - Remove NPM/Bower junk
• npm run clean:processes - Kill processes, which is useful when watch dies (see note below)

Notes

• Watch dies when switching branches because files are temporarily removed

NPM Packages

Client packages:

• Font Awesome
• sanitize.css - Browser reset
• Hashgrid (Bower)
• retina.js (Bower)

Development stuff:

• Autoprefixer - Automatically generate CSS vendor prefixes
• Browserify - Javascript modules
• clear - Clear the screen (used by NPM scripts)
• clean-css - CSS minifier
• http-server - Simple static server (used with Live Reload)
• less.js - CSS preprocessor
• live-reload - Live reloading
• Parallel Shell - Flaky little tool to run multiple NPM scripts in parallel
• UglifyJS - Javascript minifier
• watch - Watch filesystem for changes (used with Live Reload)