Backbone Boilerplate

This boilerplate is the product of much research and frustration. Existing boilerplates freely modify Backbone core, lack a build process, and are very prescriptive; Backbone Boilerplate changes that.

The Backbone Boilerplate is a way of organizing a web application with some opinionated defaults: such as Backbone, Lo-Dash, jQuery, RequireJS, Bower, Grunt, and the HTML5 Boilerplate styles.

Organize your application with a logical file structure, develop your Models/Collections/Views/Routers inside modules, and build knowing you have efficient code that will not bottleneck your users.

Thanks to our Contributors! Special Thanks to: cowboy, iros, nimbupani, wookiehangover, and jugglinmike for helping me create this project. Extra Special Thanks to: Paul Guinan for giving me usage rights to his fantastic Boilerplate character.

Documentation

View the Backbone Boilerplate documentation here:

GitHub Wiki

Getting started

The easiest way to get started is to install Git and clone the repository:

1# Make a project directory and enter it.
2mkdir my-project ; cd my-project
3
4# Using Git, fetch only the latest commits.  You won't need the full history
5# for your project.
6git clone --depth 1 git@github.com:backbone-boilerplate/backbone-boilerplate.git .

You will need to download and install Node.js if you want to use the commands in the following sections.

Updating dependencies

Third party packages may update independently from this main repo, so it's a good idea to update after fetching. There are two different package managers that you need to install and call update on.

1# Install Bower.  Depending on your user account you may need to gain
2# elevated privileges using something like `sudo`.
3npm install bower -gq
4
5# Install NPM and Bower dependencies (Bower is hooked up in package.json).
6npm install -q

Build process

The build process consists of numerous Grunt plugin tasks that work together to optimize your application.

1# Make sure you install grunt-cli globally.  Depending on your user account you
2# may need to gain elevated privileges using something like `sudo`.
3npm install grunt-cli -gq
4
5# To run the build process, run the default Grunt task.
6grunt
7
8# To test that the build process works.
9grunt server:release

License

Copyright (c) 2013 Tim Branyen (@tbranyen)
Licensed under the MIT license.