I agree. For such a simple script, requiring all these tools (npm, bower, composer, grunt), it just doesn't seem practical.
Is this how people develop and deploy PHP stuff nowadays?
Is this how people develop and deploy PHP stuff nowadays?
One of the few strengths of PHP is that there doesn't have to be a "build process."
You don't even have to compile CSS and JS, really, but I guess people aren't comfortable with js or css which isn't machine generated. Fair enough - there are benefits to that, but as general practice, it's needless complexity.
I made it more obvious in the readme that you do not need build tools to run Hosty. Seems like that confused a lot of people.
I would just not use grunt. I understand it's not required to run it, but even as a build dependency, unless you already have Node installed and running, it's a lot of overhead for relatively little benefit, I think.
Granted, the amount of friction involved depends on personal preference, and whatever environment you're working in, but why require a package manager in another language (and, potentially, the language itself) when one exists for the language you're actually deploying in?
You don't minify your production js?
Sure, to keep it simple you could download your JS and PHP deps once and bundle them all up in one nice zip. I think many apps provide a "dist" or "release" bundle (this one, in fact, does) in which you don't have to care about Composer, Bower or npm. However, to properly organize deps or define build processes for development, why not use some of the (frankly) common tools available?
It's funny how HN could see a simple unzip-and-go app and scoff "amateur hour hobby project". But if someone takes a more formal approach to their hobby app it can flip and scoff "over-engineered bloated setup".
Most of the build process is meant to create small, versioned files, so users don't need to download full jQuery/Bootstrap stuff. I would feel bad for not optimizing my assets.