Cake and Coffee

While working with CoffeeScript, we generally tend to do the following,

• write something in a .coffee file
• compile that file with coffee compiler to .js file

Well, if we are a little smarter, then use the following command to compile all the .coffee files in a particular folder to respective .js file in another folder.

coffee --compile --output outputFolder/ inputFolder/

That may seem enough now, but actually there are a lot of things we could automate. The native way to do this in CoffeeScript is called Cake. We can look at it as a build system. Nice thing about this is, we can write every instruction in CoffeeScript itself.

• Cake is an utility comes with CoffeeScript
• its a task runner or build system
• all the instructions are saved in a file with name Cakefile
• Cakefile is the file name and there is no extension to it
• Everything inside the Cakefile is a CoffeeScript expression

To run the Cake task runner, navigate to the folder, where our Cakefile is residing and fire up the command as below.

cake

That will display all the tasks available in that file to be run. To run a specific task, run

cake taskName

While defining tasks, we can make a relation between tasks. That means we can say taskOne is dependent on taskTwo. The basics of CoffeeScript project has a Cakefile for reference.

The direct link to the sample Cakefile is here. All the code are commented for easy reference.

Happy Coding.