Goal

In an early version of our front-end build system we were using browserify which was great but got slower as we added more build files. Before webpack became its successor I built a CLI tool to select files manually and return a stream of them in vinyl format to be compatible with the gulp library. Heavily inspired by git add --interactive.

Process

1. Study behavior of git add -i
2. Studied redux, introduced by a coworker, to manage application state
3. Replicate the behavior of git add -i in JS
4. Take the selected output and return a stream of vinyl files.

Discoveries

• First redux project
• Learned how to write more complex CLI tools
• Introduced to immutability from working with Redux
• More stream experience which made building even more complex tooling even easier
• Learned how to read input with Node’s API.