[WIP] Ember Giftwrap

This is a work-in-progress. It's alpha quality. Feedback appreciated.

Why?

The Ember addons ecosystem is one of the best things about Ember. But users stuck on legacy build systems have a hard time taking advantage of it.

This tool is intended to be able to take any set of Ember addons and package them in a standalone JS file that can be injected directly into any Ember app, no matter how it was built.

How?

1. Create a new ember-cli app. It will serve as a place to install the addons that you intend to package.

2. Install the exact same Ember version you intend to use in your application. This ensures that any templates inside the addons will get compiled with the right compiler.

3. Install whatever addons you want, using ember install. Remember that ember-cli will only recognize addons if they are both present in node_modules and listed in your package.json.

4. Install this addon with ember install ember-giftwrap.

5. Run ember giftwrap. You should end up with one JS file, one CSS file, and a sourcemap file, all in the wrapped subdir.

6. Add the script and stylesheet to your Ember app.

7. Right after instantiating your app, activate the addons like this:

App = Ember.Application.create();
GiftWrap.install(App);

Details of the GiftWrap API

We create a global object named GiftWrap. It has these methods & properties:

• install(app): takes an instance of Ember.Application and registers the packaged addons with the application's registry.

• require(moduleName): gives you access to the modules defined inside the addons bundle. For example, var LiquidFire = GiftWrap.require('liquid-fire');.

• define(): gives you access to the AMD defining function used inside the addons bundle. This lets you pass modules to the addons. (We automatically define('ember', ...) for them as long as window.Ember exists).

• env: an object that you can use to pass configuration to addons that are expecting to find it in config/environment.js.

Known Caveats

• there is no automatic support for addons that attempt to inject content directly into index.html.

• ember giftwrap always packages all the addons that are installed, there's not currently a way to be more picky. Default ember apps include addons you may not need (ember-cli-ic-ajax, ember-data, etc), so you'll want to remove them from your package.json if that's the case.

• preprocessor addons that blow up if they don't find the files or directories they're looking for can be problematic for us, since we aren't actually building a real app.