Compiled files and environments

[onishiweb]

Been discussing Grunt and other scripts/styles issues with @dgmstuart around how we manage and reference compiled scripts and stylesheets in the Whippet Theme. The main question was: when do we run grunt --env=production and commit the files and how do we work with these in terms of development?

In Grunt we have the production environment but this relies on being run with the --env flag, which not many people are aware of. On EiG we've been running grunt production when either solving merge conflicts or before doing a PR to make sure things are minified etc. but this isn't a standard practice.

Some ideas for solutions include:

• Make sure grunt production is run before deploying to production; this would be a bit of dev workflow management. Or...
• Have grunt by default create a minified version as well as a dev version and include the appropriate one based on environment or some other factor

Environment or other factor

• We could include environments in the scripts.php file to include different versions of scripts/styles for each different environment using the GP_ENVIRONMENT constant (as discussed with @leedxw & @harry-m and implemented on Govsite)
• Include production (minified) versions of files by default and only include dev versions when in a "debug" mode - set by Whippet Server or something similar?

Any thoughts @harry-m @tomdxw?

[dgmstuart]

Just to chip in: for me the point about running grunt --env=production is that it's a step which needs to be remembered, and the impacts of not doing it could be significant (In terms of page load time?). ...hence the need for an automated process.

[harry-m]

I agree it would be best if this was not an additional manual step for people to remember. My instinct on reading the above is that we should have Grunt create both, and update the Whippet deploy module to exclude the development versions.

@onishiweb Happy for you to discuss with the team and decide which way to go.

[mallorydxw]

I think #18 mostly resolves this. There's also #24.