I'm currently preparing to release my first aurelia based application. I've got nearly everything figured out, except some small details.
I found myself wanting to load some of the css before the application starts; specifically, animation logic for the loading div. I want this because otherwise the spinner won't spin. I know I can just include the spinner css separately, but I need (want) the animate lib anyway, so might as well add it. I've added the following to my index.html:
<link href="jspm_packages/github/daneden/[email protected]/animate.min.css" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Open+Sans:300,400,600,700" rel="stylesheet">
<link href="dist/styles/style.css" rel="stylesheet"/>
This feels wrong for two reasons. First, I can bundle this css with aurelia-bundler, so shouldn't I? And secondly, which actually brings me to my next question...
animate is in jspm_packages, which feels like it shouldn't be in version control. However, I do need the file. So, I could perhaps opt to copy the file to dist/ in my build process. This question also applies to the dist/ dir, which now contains the bundled files (made by aurelia-bundler) as well as my static assets (less to css, optimized images and minified json files), but also the source files used for dev (es2015-compiled files). The dist dir is in .gitignore as well as jspm_packages. Images get loaded from dist/ and so do stylesheets. index.html isn't in dist, so I can't use relative paths and simply make a build directory. I'm a bit stuck here.
Update: Another example of a file that should be deployed, is jspm_packages/system.js. That's in jspm_packages, which isn't in version control.
I would agree: jspm_packages and its contents should probably not be under source control during development.
But that does not stop you deploying those artefacts as part of a build process. For example, my output directory for a deployable build would look something like:
/deploy
/jspm_packages
system.js
system-polyfills.js
app-bundle-vXXX-js
config.js
index.html
None of the above would be under my normal development version control. Same goes for anything else generated (css from SASS/LESS, etc) and other 3rd party stuff that is not included in the bundle.
But that does not stop me generating a separate built/released/deployed versions of the above /deploy output (probably zipped or tarred ready to dump onto the deployment servers) if I need to keep track of versioned releases. In theory, I could recreate the build any time from the versioned source, but I might also want to store the versioned build output somewhere too.
Much depends on your approach to release management.