Publishing Vanilla

We’ve got a new CSS framework at Canonical, named Vanilla. My colleague Ant has a great write-up introducing Vanilla. Essentially it’s a CSS microframework powered by Sass. The build process consists of two steps, an open source build, and a private build.

Open Source Build

While there are inevitably componants that need to be kept private (keys, tokens, etc.) being Canonical, we want to keep much of the build in the open, in addition to the code. We wanted the build to be as automated and close to CI/CD principles as possible. Here’s what happens:

Committing to our github repository kicks off a travis build that runs gulp tests, which include sass-lint. And we also use david-dm.org to make sure our npm dependencies are up to date. All of these have nice badges we can link to right from our github page, so the first thing people see is the heath of our project. I really like this, it keeps us honest, and informs the community.

Not everything can be done with travis, however, as publishing Vanilla to npm, updating our project page and demo site require some private credentials. For the confidential build, we use Jenkins. (formally Hudson, a java-based build management system.).

Private Build with Jenkins

Our Jenkins build does a few things:

1. Increment the package.json version number
2. npm publish (package)
3. Build Sass with npm install
4. Upload css to our assets server
5. Update Sassdoc
6. Update demo site with new CSS

Robin put this functionality together in a neat bash script: publish.sh.

We use this script in a Jenkins build that we kick off with a few parameters, point, minor and major to indicate the version to be updated in package.json. This allows our devs push-button releases on the fly, with the same build, from bugfixes all the way up to stable releases (1.0.0)

After less than 30 seconds, our demo site, which showcases framework elements and their usage, is updated. This demo is styled with the latest version of Vanilla, and also serves as documentation and a test of the CSS. We take advantage of github’s html publishing feature, Github Pages. Anyone can grab – or even hotlink – the files on our release page.

The Future

It’d be nice for the regression test (which we currently just eyeball) to be automated, perhaps with a visual diff tool such as PhantomCSS or a bespoke solution with Selenium.

Wrap-up

Vanilla is ready to hack on, go get it here and tell us what you think! (And yes, you can get it in colours other than Ubuntu Orange)