Target/config profiles support.

[igorlino]

Hi John,

I have done some related-work recently where we target different deployments.

The basic requirement was configuration based on 3 profiles (production, integration/test, local) that included:

• configuration of 1 or many REST endpoints
• the root base the application it self. (contained usually in the index.html)

The gulp-config works well for project structure/resources related things but it works less good when deployment-related configuration is needed.

What I did was:

• created a /profile/ directory containing a json file per "profile target" { "end-point-url" : ''http://...." "app-root-base" : "/test/" }
• Extend the gulpfile.js/gulp.config.js files to add a profile variable so that we can call: gulp build --profile production in the case a /profile/production.json file exists, then that configuration would be used.
• There would be some constants/configuration js file that has some @@constants_ids that would be replaced when matched.
• Process the JS for constant replacement
• Text-replace the to whatever is declared under "app-root-base"

The challenge was of course how to keep the configuration working for both: 1)the "production" processed/optimized code/application. (easy case since it just go through the regular gulp stream) 2)the local dev non-optimized. (difficult case)

The reason why #2 is difficult is because the resources js/html are not processed by gulp, therefore no text-replace nor constant js can be generated that would be recognized. I don't like my solution since @@constants_ids has default value in case it does not get replaced. => Effectively making /profile/localdev.json a difficult case. Also, one cannot cleanly update index.html, otherwise, it would be check-in depending on the profile you used on the gulp call. (this is less of a problem, as the root "/" is good enough)

Perhaps there would be a more cleaver way to achieve it ?

(I could provide the changes I did, even if they are clearly ugly.)

Cheers

[johnpapa]

please show them

[igorlino]

Alright :) , the goodies are under: https://github.com/johnpapa/gulp-patterns/pull/89