Tamper

So you can tamper with your preprocessed files all you want, and make sure it's all compressed down in the end.

Tamper allows you to develop using HAML, Compass/SASS, and CoffeeScript without havining to worry about the pre-processing and deployment.

Tamper is 2 things:

1. a development web server for sites consisting of mainly static files

2. a script to ease deployment of static files so that they are served in the most performant way

A development web server for static files

Static sites nowadays are not built with HTML, CSS, and Javascript, like grandma used to do it. These days, we have HAML, Compass, and CoffeeScript. They are obviously much more awesome, because they all use significant whitespace. Except they have another thing in common: they need to be pre-processed into something grandma's browser can understand.

Let me tell you, that's a PITA. Because running a command to compile on each change is not an option. If grandma used to be able to make a change and refresh, I want to be able to do it too.

The usual solution is to run a script that watches files for changes, and compiles them on the fly. Except I'm way faster than the script. By the time the script is done compiling, I've already refreshed the browser 27 times and I'm wondering why my change had no effect.

We need a better solution. And the solution is right here. That's right, it's a development web server. Like the one Django has. But for static files.

A script for high-performance deployments

With the help of Compass and CoffeeScript, Tamper conflates all your CSS and Javascript into two files, master.css and master.js, and it minifies them. Optionally, it also gzips them and uploads them to S3 so you can serve them using Cloudfront. As it uploads the files, it also updates all the references within the files to point to the latest version on Cloudfront.

Set up

Prerequisites

The development server runs on Node.js, so you're gonna need to install that first.

HAML, SASS, and Compass are Ruby modules. You can install them all like this:

gem install compass

If you want to write your scripts in CoffeeScript, install Npm, then:

npm install coffee-script

Finally, if you want good support for Markdown in your HAML files, you should also install Maruku:

gem install maruku

Start development

Run:

node develop.js

Then visit http://localhost:5678/. If you did everything right you should see a simple static web site.

Deployment

Watch this space for help on how to compile and compress all the static files for deployment and (optionally) upload them to CloudFront.

Docs

Read the beautiful Docco docs for the development web server.