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An overview of Figuration, including how to use it, basic templates, examples, and more.

Build Tools

Figuration uses Grunt for its CSS and JavaScript build system and Jekyll for the written documentation. Our Gruntfile includes convenient methods for working with the framework, including compiling code, running tests, and more.

Page Contents

Tooling Setup

To use our Gruntfile and run our documentation locally, you'll need a copy of Figuration's source files, Node.js, and Grunt. Follow these steps and you should be ready to rock:

  1. Download and install Node.js, which we use to manage our dependencies.
  2. Install the Grunt command line tools, grunt-cli, with npm install -g grunt-cli.
  3. Navigate to the root /figuration directory and run npm install to install our local dependencies listed in package.json.
  4. Install Ruby, install Bundler with gem install bundler, and finally run bundle install. This will install all Ruby dependencies, such as Jekyll and plugins.
  • Windows users: Read this guide to get Jekyll up and running without problems.

When completed, you'll be able to run the various Grunt commands provided from the command line.

Using Grunt

Our Gruntfile includes the following commands and tasks:

Task Description
grunt Run grunt to run tests locally and compile the CSS and JavaScript into /dist. Uses Sass, Autoprefixer, postcss-flexbugs-fixes, and UglifyJS.
grunt dist grunt dist creates the /dist directory with compiled files. Uses Sass, Autoprefixer, postcss-flexbugs-fixes, and UglifyJS.
grunt test Runs stylelint, JSHint and QUnit tests headlessly in PhantomJS.
grunt docs Builds and tests CSS, JavaScript, and other assets which are used when running the documentation locally via jekyll serve.
grunt watch This is a convenience method for watching just Sass files and automatically building them whenever you save.

Sass Compiler

Figuration is compiled with libsass via grunt-sass. There are no alternative options at this time.

Autoprefixer

Figuration uses Autoprefixer (included in our Gruntfile and build process) to automatically add vendor prefixes to some CSS properties at build time. Doing so saves us time and code by allowing us to write key parts of our CSS a single time while eliminating the need for vendor mixins.

We maintain the list of browsers supported through Autoprefixer in a separate file within our GitHub repository. See /grunt/autoprefixer-settings.json for details.

postcss-flexbugs-fixes

Also included in our Gruntfile and build process is postcss-flexbugs-fixes to work around some browser issues for flexbox layout. More information about these issues can be found over at the Flexbugs repository.

Local Documentation

Running our documentation locally requires the use of Jekyll, a decently flexible static site generator that provides us: basic includes, Markdown-based files, templates, and more. Here's how to get it started:

  1. Run through the tooling setup above to install Jekyll (the site builder) and other Ruby dependencies with bundle install.
  2. From the root /figuration directory, run bundle exec jekyll serve in the command line.
  3. Open http://localhost:9001 in your browser, and enjoy.

Learn more about using Jekyll by reading its documentation.

Troubleshooting

Should you encounter problems with installing dependencies or running Grunt commands, uninstall all previous dependency versions (global and local). Then, rerun npm install.

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