gulp4-ps-tasks

gulp4-ps-tasks is a collection of Gulp tasks that makes it easier and faster to develop PowerSchool customizations and deploy them to a PowerSchool "image" server (cdn).

Installation

1. Install dependencies:

npm install -g babel babel-cli babel-register babel-plugin-transform-es2015-modules-commonjs
npm install --save-dev gulp-ps-tasks

2. Copy .babelrc and local.gulpfile.babel.js to the root of your project folder.

3. Rename the local (in your project folder) version of local.gulpfile.babel.js to gulpfile.babel.js.

Configuration

config.json

A gulp.config.json file is required for the following information:

• Image server sftp credentials
• Any URLs that should be dynamically inserted into your project's code The gulp.config.json file location can be specified one of two ways. As soon as a config file is found, the search for a config file stops and the first config file found is used. Note that the config path should only include the path to your gulp.config.json file -- it should not include the gulp.config.json filename itself. Trailing slashes don't matter, they will be removed if they're included.

1. gulp.config.json is placed in your project folder.
2. Set an environment variable, PSTASKS_ROOT, to the directory path of your gulp.config.json file.

If you have a large number of plugins, I recommend using method 3 because it allows you to create and maintain a single gulp.config.json file that can be used across all of your plugins. However, if you want it to just work, use method 2.

gulp.config.example.json

The following config example should be used as a starting point for your own gulp.config.json file.

{
  "ps_test1": {
    "ps_url": "https://pstest1.example.com",
    "api_url": "https://psappstest.example.com"
  },

  "ps_prod": {
    "ps_url": "https://ps.example.com",
    "api_url": "https://psapps.example.com"
  },

  "default_deploy_target": "ps_prod"
}

Contributing

Login to npm

To make a new release of this package, you'll need to be logged in to npmjs.com as icsd.

To sign in to npmjs.com:

$ npm login
Username: icsd
Password: 
Email: (this IS public) data@ironmail.org
Logged in as icsd on https://registry.npmjs.org

Build and publish

1. Increment the package version. To do this, open this project's package.json file and change the "package:" value. This package follows Semantic Versioning. The new version you choose for this package should conform to Semantic Versioning's guidelines for MAJOR, MINOR, or PATCH changes.
2. Run gulp createPackage to compile this package
3. cd dist/
4. npm publish to publish to the npm registry

Note: It's important you run npm publish from the dist/ directory. If you publish this package without being in the dist/ directory, you'll publish the non-compiled version of this package and it will not be usable.

Usage

After you publish a new version of this package, you'll need to change your PowerSchool plugin's package.json to use the new version. To do this, cd to the plugin directory and run:

yarn upgrade --latest gulp4-ps-tasks

Task Usage

Run a task using gulp {taskname}

Utility tasks

preprocess

Invokes the preprocessor. Separated out as a reusable Gulp pipe that can be be used by an Gulp task. At one point in this package's history, there were multiple tasks that called the preprocessor, but that is no longer the case, so the the index.js code could be refactored to put the code in the preprocessor lazypipe into the buildPreprocess task, but that isn't necessary for this package to properly function.

clean

Removes all files and folders in the dist/ folder

zip

Takes all files and folders that are within the dist/ folder (the dist/ folder itself is not included), and creates a plugin.zip ZIP archive file. This plugin.zip file is stored in the dist/ folder.

Build Tasks

tl;dr: Run gulp createPkg to compile your code into a plugin.zip file that can be installed as a PowerSchool plugin.

Build tasks are a basic building-block tasks that performs a process on multiple files.

buildPreprocess

Uses preprocessor to insert the PowerSchool URL and "API URL" into your project. We do this dynamic insertion of URLs so we don't have to manually hard-code the URL to a test instance of PowerSchool while we're developing, and then have to change it when deploying to production.

imgCopy

Recursively copies all files in the plugin/web_root/images/**/* directory to the dist/web_root/images directory.

buildWebpack

Calls the webpack module bundler. It uses the webpack.prod.babel.js file found in your PowerSchool plugin's directory for its configuration. This task is only meant to be run for production builds, so it won't be used in development. The Webpack Dev Server will build and make available the compiled files via a web server for our development environment.

Task Runners

Task runners handle the calling of Build tasks to create a larger workflow.

runBuildTasks

Runs all of the build tasks defined in the Build tasks section above. buildPreprocess and imgCopy are run in series (wait for the first task to complete before running the next one), and while those two tasks are running, the buildWebpack task is run. We run the build tasks in this way to try to keep build times as low as possible.

Orchestrators

Orchestrators should perform a full build. They should start running the clean Utility task, call one or more Task Runners to perform workflows, then call zip to create the plugin file. For now, this package provides one Orchestrator, createPkg.

createPkg

Top-level plugin package creation task. Run this task to create a usable plugin that can be installed in PowerSchool. Cleans the dist/ directory by calling the clean Utility task, runs the runBuildTasks Task Runner, then creates a plugin.zip file with the resulting files by calling the zip Utility task.