Harness

Tools for writing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript with unit and integration testing, dependency management, deployment and API mocks. harness depends on node.js and is really just a set of scripts that run CLI commands.

The most common use case is a project that involves a Rails app and a Backbone.js app. Traditionally, both apps would be kept in the same codebase out of convenience but at the expense of portability and boundary. With harness you can give the apps separate codebases and still have the same test and front end preprocessing tools you'd expect with a Rails stack.

Write an app with harness and deploy it to any host web app or even S3.

Think in terms of a host and guest app situation. harness builds guest apps to be embedded on pages in Rails host apps.

Features

Auto-compiling assets

• Compiled on save
• CoffeeScript
• Stylus

Browser auto-refresh with live-reload

• Page is refreshed in any browser currently opened to localhost:8080 every time a source file changes

Auto-running unit tests in all browsers with jasmine and testem

• Unit tests are auto-run in any browser currently opened to localhost:7357 every time a source or test file changes

Headless integration tests in Webkit with casperjs

• Run integration tests regularly to assert common use cases and user flows

Documentation with groc

• Inline comments with markdown are parsed and displayed as HTML documentation

Dependency management with browserify

• Modularize, prevent global leakage, and control module dependencies

Endpoint mocks with express

• Mock out server endpoints with sample responses that mimic production

Deployment to filesystem

• make deploy accepts an OUTPUT variable to cp the output assets to another codebase on the filesystem

Collateral Benefits

App/Platform independent

• Embeddable for any app in any country on any platform. Just define some configuration and endpoints.

Runtime dependency independent

• Use any dependencies you want -- backbone.js, ember.js or fuckit.js

Clear and defined integration points

• Forces upfront thought to define the boundaries and interfaces for client-side code

Less global impact

• Reduce the reliance on super objects

Fast and transparent tests

• Run automatically on every file change so test setup is painless
• Early detection of regressions

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Dependencies

• gcc: install via Xcode
• node.js 0.8.8+
• pygments: sudo easy_install pygments
• casper.js: brew install casperjs

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Usage

WIP

Before this is legitimized as a CLI tool, feel free to copy the Makefile, package.json, and harness/ dir into your own repo and run npm install.

Eventual CLI:

harness generate to generate an example config and app directory structure.

harness dev starts file watchers for app/source and app/test and a server at http://localhost:8080 for development.

harness test to run tests every time a source or test file is changed.

harness deploy to make a build and cp public/prefix* to the configured output directory in .harness.yml.