[rjd]

I couldn't agree more here. After reading the source code on the twitter css bootstrap makefile a few years ago I got inspired and wrote my own rewrite of what they had... I was blown away by the gains at it gave me. Of note I bound make to cmd+b in Sublime Text, and I just compile when I see fit.

I've now tweaked my make files so they are almost unrecognisable from the twitter ones, it can run PHP, JS unit tests, fires up phantomJS and tests individual modules, can release minified for production, or not for debugging purposes. I can't stress how useful it is being able to just add a line and you get such powerful support.

I haven't had time to add git hooks yet, but thats the next stage, I plan to set the hooks to run tests and clamp down on poor quality code (I work with interns quite often... sometimes I cry for just average quality code coming in).

For a story of the production gains I've had. I moved the whole company CSS into a CSS preprocessor and cleaned up all the existing structures to fit the make file release procedure. It came back a thousand fold away a rebranding and I had everything done in two days. I was blown away with that alone, I've been involved in so many rebrands over the years that go on for months... not hours.

Do it, if you're bit unsure where to start check the twitter bootstrap build file and muck around with what they have done.

[jeffbr13]

They've used Grunt for builds for a while now[0].

It seems most of the twitter-style web developer community who happily replaced `make` with `rake` when developing for Rails simply followed that with `grunt` when they moved to JavaScript.

[0]: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/commit/0d33455ef486d0cf06c...

[rjd]

Cool, I've read good things about grunt but haven't had the time to look into it. Its direct access to the CLI thats the killer for me with make ... and to be frank ... if I was going to script in a third party language it would probably be python and not javascript but each to there own.

[Offler]

Don't rely too much on Grunt, only use Grunt/Gulp when npm scripts doesn't do the trick. npm scripts has the same direct command invocation that make has so no need for plugins.