Baker
A build tool by and for the Los Angeles Times
Overview
Baker is a highly versatile build tool developed by and for the Los Angeles Times, designed specifically to create static web pages for projects published on latimes.com. It provides a streamlined development environment that simplifies the process of transforming custom code into visually appealing web content, making it a valuable resource for developers and content creators alike. Whether you're working on data visualizations, interactive news applications, or personal projects, Baker empowers you to publish with minimal coding effort.
With a robust set of features and an emphasis on modern web standards, Baker integrates various technologies such as HTML templating, CSS preprocessing, and advanced JavaScript bundling. It has been utilized by both the Los Angeles Times and other organizations to create unique digital experiences, showcasing its flexibility and practicality in the realm of web development.
Features
- Node.js Requirements: Requires Node.js version 14 or higher along with Node Package Manager for smooth operation.
- HTML Templating with Nunjucks: Utilizes Nunjucks for a powerful templating experience, offering an efficient way to organize HTML pages.
- Sass for CSS: Employs Sass as a CSS preprocessor, allowing advanced features like nesting and mixins for cleaner and more maintainable styles.
- Autoprefixer Integration: Automatically adds necessary browser prefixes to your CSS for enhanced compatibility across different platforms.
- JavaScript Bundling with Rollup: Packages your JavaScript using Rollup, optimizing performance and ensuring fast load times for end users.
- Data Imports via Quaff: Simplifies the import of structured data files, making it ideal for creating dynamic data visualizations.
- Premade Starter Templates: Includes GitHub-hosted starter templates with pre-configured HTML, styles, and scripts for quick project setup.
- Customizable Deployment Solutions: Offers GitHub Actions for easy deployment of both staging and production versions of your pages with minimal configuration.
- Svelte
Svelte is a modern front-end framework that compiles your code at build time, resulting in smaller and faster applications. It uses a reactive approach to update the DOM, allowing for high performance and a smoother user experience.
- SCSS
SCSS is a preprocessor scripting language that extends the capabilities of CSS by adding features such as variables, nesting, and mixins. It allows developers to write more efficient and maintainable CSS code, and helps to streamline the development process by reducing repetition and increasing reusability.
- Postcss
PostCSS is a popular open-source tool that enables web developers to transform CSS styles with JavaScript plugins. It allows for efficient processing of CSS styles, from applying vendor prefixes to improving browser compatibility, ultimately resulting in cleaner, faster, and more maintainable code.
- Rollup
RollupJS is a popular and efficient JavaScript module bundler that takes the code from multiple modules and packages them into a single optimized file, minimizing the overall size of the application and improving its performance.
- Typescript
TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript, providing optional static typing, classes, interfaces, and other features that help developers write more maintainable and scalable code. TypeScript's static typing system can catch errors at compile-time, making it easier to build and maintain large applications.