Saturday, 26 October 2013

Jekyll and Foundation with Guard

tl;dr - I've dropped the jekyll asset pipeline in favour of Guard in my pre-configured example project of Jekyll and Foundation.

A few weeks I wrote about my attempts to create a bootstrapped jekyll / foundation combination using the Jekyll asset pipeline to keep things building on the fly. I hit a snag, though. The asset pipeline was abandoned back in February and is locked to version 0.12 of Jekyll (current release being 1.2.1 at the time of writing). There are various forks of the project which bring things up to date but I'm worried about being left in the same position again and, frankly, I'm starting to question the methodology of using Jekyll to do everything instead of running the tools separately.

What I really want, I think, is some kind of meta-tool which lets me manage my build environment but by using the core tools - in my case Jekyll and Compass and probably a CoffeeScript processor eventually - so I (hopefully) have fewer maintenance problems down the line. Seems like Guard is pretty much what I want. I'm coupling it with guard-jekyll-plus and guard-compass to work with those tools. It isn't perfect, and doesn't assuage my dependency fears entirely but it feels a much more robust solution than the previous version.

My basic jekyll-foundation project has been changed to use this new tool chain and seems much more responsive than before (could be anecdotal) so I'm looking forward to making more use of it.