Learn Grep, Gulp and Redwoodjs

CMD+F in your text editor can only get you so far! In this course, we will learn to use grep and find, two powerful command-line utilities, to search through and explore our codebase. Learn to search specific files and folders, using regular expressions to look for -- or ignore! -- particular phrases. We'll cover how to search recursively, get more context on your results, and some simple tricks to make your searches faster and more targeted.


Once you're familiar with grep and find, you'll be able to quickly answer questions such as: Do I use this function anywhere other than my tests? Where does this file get imported? Whether you're working on a new feature, reading a codebase for the first time, or refactoring existing code, grep and find can help you work faster and more effectively.

A Unix command used to search files for the occurrence of a string of characters that matches a specified pattern.

grep

Use Grep for Fast Search from the Command Line

Sometimes you'll be looking for a string, but won't know which file it's in; or you'll want to find all usages of it within a directory. Learn how to use grep -r to recursively search all the files in a directory. 

Search directory contents recursively using grep

Learn how to use find to identify filenames matching specified patterns. We'll use find to identify all .jsx files in a directory, or all test files in a directory.

Use find to search for filename patterns

Learn to use git grep to only search through the tracked files in a git repo. This is especially useful when you want to exclude build artifacts or locally installed dependencies, such as webpack bundles or the node_modules directory. You'll also note that git grep is automatically colorized - we'll see how to get the same coloring effect with grep --color.

Search the contents of a git repository with git grep

By default, grep displays the file path and the line where a match is found. Learn to use the flags -A, -B, -C, and -n to get more context, and view line numbers as well as the lines surrounding a pattern match.


Show context around matches using grep

By using wildcards and glob patterns with the special characters . and *, you can create regular expressions that describe what kind of text you're looking for, instead of just plaintext strings. 

Search for basic patterns using grep

Learn to use grep's extended regular expressions to describe more complex patterns. The `?` and `+` special characters describe optional patterns. The `?` character matches zero or one instance of the preceding term, and the `+` character matches one or more instances of the preceding term. To use these characters, you'll need to either escape them with backslashes or turn on extended regular expressions with the `-E` flag.

Use grep's extended regular expressions to find complex patterns

Learn to use the special anchor characters `^` and `$` to indicate the beginning and end of lines when writing regular expressions for grep. These line anchors are part of basic regular expressions in grep, so you don't need to escape them.

Specify line beginning and end in patterns using grep

You can describe classes of characters using bracket expressions. We'll use expressions such as [a-zA-Z] and [0-9] to search for alphabetic and numeric characters with grep.

Match classes of characters using bracket expressions with grep

Describe optional patterns with grep OR using the vertical bar character `|`. By using the `|` special character, you can write either-or style patterns. In this lesson we'll look for matches on "grey" or "gray". Like the `+` and `?` characters, the `|` character is part of extended regular expressions with grep, so you'll either need to escape it with a backslash, or use the -E flag.

Search for optional patterns with grep OR

By grouping your searches with parentheses, you can create even more complex searches. Grouping lets you separate out different parts of your regular expression, and apply special characters like +, ?, and * to groups of search terms.

Search with groups using grep

 Learn the basic syntax for using grep to search the contents of a single file or files. It's like CMD+F, but better! You'll be able to quickly see all matching results in a file.

Search the contents of files using grep

Gulp is a toolkit for automating painful or time-consuming tasks in your development workflow, so you can stop messing around and build something.

gulp

Building upon the `watch` task that we begin this lesson with, we’ll look at how to create a local development server using the `app` directory as the web root. By using Browsersync to achieve this, we can also instruct all connected browsers to automatically reload each time our bundle is re-generated. Browsersync has a public `.stream()` method that is designed exactly for this purpose.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Live Reload with Browsersync

Learn to use the xargs Unix command to combine find and grep. First we can use find to identify which files we want to search; then we can use xargs to tell grep which files to search through.

Search matching files by combining find and grep with xargs

What happens when you want to find things that don't contain a pattern? The -v flag lets you use grep in inverse mode. We'll use grep -v against find's output to exclude files in node_modules.


Find matches excluding a pattern with grep

Babel has support for the latest version of JavaScript through syntax transformers. These plugins allow you to use new syntax, right now without waiting for browser support.

babel

What is already a nice workflow using Gulp, Browserify, Watchify & Browsersync to enable auto rebuilds & live browser reloading can be further improved by adding Babelify. A simple wrapper around the popular transpiler Babel, Babelify can ‘transform’ source files as they pass through our stream to enable certain Javascript features not yet available in the Browser or Node. We end the lesson by looking at how to generate & extract sourcemaps using `exorcist`.

Gulp and Browserify - Adding Babel & Source Maps

Browserify lets you require('modules') in the browser by bundling up all of your dependencies.

browserify

Let's look at the basics of setting up Gulp and Browserify. Creating a Gulp task from scratch, we'll cover how to utilise the Browserify API to generate a single `bundle.js` file, catch and log any errors that occur in the compilation process, transform the stream into a format that can be consumed by `gulp.dest` and finish by writing the bundle to a `dist` directory.

Gulp and Browserify - Initial Setup

A brief introduction to using GulpJS in your JavaScript application and creating your first Gulp task.

Installing and Writing a Default Task with Gulp

Beginning with a single Gulp task capable of generating a one-time Browserify bundle, we enable file-watching and incremental rebuilds by incorporating Watchify. We add a second task `watch` & refactor our initial code to enable the bulk of it to be re-used. We’ll look at exactly how to ‘wire’ these tools together and how the relationship between Watchify & Browserify can manifest into a seriously efficient workflow.

Gulp and Browserify - Hooking up Watchify

We will look at bundling your JavaScript files using Gulp, Gulp-Concat, and Gulp-Uglify

Bundling Your JavaScript Files with Gulp

In this lesson, we’ll use `grep` to find text patterns. We’ll also go over some of the flags that `grep` has that can be combined together to make it more powerful and easier to read.

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