Skip to main content

Integrating LESS and Maven

When working on your local workstation, running a local instance of your website is very helpful. I often create two scripts to move code from my development workspace into the local website instance. One takes the war file outputted by Maven and publishes it. The second takes all of my static content and publishes it bypassing Maven, which is much faster than building and deploying the war file.
When integrating CSS preprocessors into the workflow, I need to make sure they run in both deployment scripts. Here are the requirements for running CSS preprpceasors in my build process:
  1. The preprocessors need to run as part of the Maven build so my compiled files make it into the war file.
  2. The preproceasors should be run when I deploy just the static resources to my local instance.
I am going to walk through installing and integrating LESS, but the concept is similar for other tools like compression or inspections.
First I need to install LESS. I am running Ubuntu, so I can simply use the package manager to grab a copy. This is described in several other places already, so I'm not going to go through the process here. Check Tilap TechBlog for an overview.
Now that it's installed, I write a short script to take the CSS files and apply LESS to them. In my case I am also applying the YUI compression that is built into LESS. You'd need to change some of the paths and names in the script for your project. My less files all roll up into "transit.less" so it's the only one I need to explicitly expand.
Now we can call it from Maven using the execution plugin.
Finally, the script needs to be wired in with my static deployment script. In my case, the static deployment is a shell script similar to the script used to call the LESS processor.
So now both of my deployment workflows use the same CSS preprocessors and render identical CSS. Note the shell scripts do tie me to Linux workstations or Cygwin, which is not a big problem for me since all of my development systems are running Ubuntu.
Labels:
Location: Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, NY, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ReactJS, NPM and Maven

I'm just starting to get into working with ReactJS, Facebook's open source rendering framework. My project uses SpringBoot for annotation-driven dependency injection and MVC. I thought it would be great if I could use a bit of ReactJS to enhance the application. If you're looking for a basic conceptual intro, I recommend ReactJS for Stupid People and of course the official documentation  is quite good. In full disclosure, I still have no idea how to do "flux" yet. As an experienced Java backend developer, I'm pretty decent at hacking Maven builds - which is precisely what this blog post is going to be about. First, a word about how React likes to be built. Like many front-end tools, there is a toolkit for the node package manager (NPM). From the command prompt, one might run npm install -g react-tools  which installs the jsx command. The  jsx  command provides the ability to transform JSX syntax into ordinary JavaScript, which is precisely what I want...
21 comments
Read more

Solved: Unable to Locate Spring Namespace Handler

I attempted to run a Spring WebMVC application, and when starting up the application complained that it didn't know how to handle the MVC namespace in my XML configuration. The project runs JDK 7 and Spring 4.0.6 using Maven as the build system. The following is my XML configuration file: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> <beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans"        xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"        xmlns:mvc="http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc"        xsi:schemaLocation="         http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans         http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd         http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc         http://www.springframework.org/schema/mvc/spring-mvc.xsd">          <mvc:annotation-driven/> ...
1 comment
Read more

Capture Everything

This week I've started planning for the next version of our data collection system. The key realization for me is that I do not know all the questions we will need to answer in the future. Our current focus is on specific sequences of click events, but in the future we might want to look at browser versions or behavioral patterns related to IP addresses. If we don't capture user-agent, for example, we won't be able to answer questions about browser versions. If we don't capture IP then we cannot look for patterns in IP addresses. We should store data in a way that maximizes the range of questions we can address in the future. In the past few years, the cost of storing data have continued to fall. We use AWS extensively.  Amazon S3 costs are very reasonable and guarantees a high level of availability. Also, lower compute costs and open source tools like Hadoop that process large data volumes have greatly increased our ability to extract valuable insights from data. So s...
Post a Comment
Read more