Brunch: Commands

brunch new / brunch n

Create new brunch project. Full syntax: brunch new [path] [-s skeleton]

• path (optional, default: .): name of project directory that would be created.
• -s, --skeleton (optional, default: simple): skeleton name or URL from brunch.io/skeletons

Example:

• brunch new: The default skeleton does not add any libraries or frameworks
• brunch new -s es6 would init a simple app that supports ECMAScript 6 compilation with Babel.
• brunch new -s react and brunch new -s redux are lovely skeletons for React fans.

You can specify environment variable BRUNCH_INIT_SKELETON for this command.

• BRUNCH_INIT_SKELETON=es6 brunch new do the same as brunch new -s es6

Firstly Brunch looks for the skeleton provided in command options, then for the env variable BRUNCH_INIT_SKELETON and if skeleton wasn't provided Brunch apply default skeleton.

brunch build / brunch b

Builds a brunch project and places the output into public directory.

• -e, --env SETTING apply settings from config.overrides[SETTING]
• -p, --production would create optimized production build. Same as -e production
• -j, --jobs WORKERS - enables experimental multi-process support. May improve compilation speed of large projects. Try different WORKERS amount to see which one works best for your system.
• -d, --debug - enables verbose debug output.

brunch watch / brunch w

Watches brunch app directory for changes and rebuilds the whole project when they happen. Options:

• all the same options available in brunch build, plus:
• -s, --server: run a simple HTTP + pushstate server that would serve public dir in /
  • -P PORT, --port PORT: define on which port the server would run

Default skeleton

• This is the best option for starting from scratch with Brunch.
• brunch new initializes new Brunch project already configured to start work.
• Clean folder structure, little and simple Brunch config and few default Brunch plugins.
• How to start and what skeleton includes you can see in it's repo.
• More about default Brunch settings and behavior you can learn in Conventions and defaults of Brunch guide.

There are more other available skeletons with already preinstalled and configured stuff for different purposes.

Tips

Install terminal-notifier (brew install terminal-notifier on Macs) to get system notifications for any build errors.

A few useful shortcuts for your shell environment, to type less and be more productive. Add those to your bashrc or zshrc:

alias bb='brunch build'
alias bbp='brunch build --production'
alias bw='brunch watch'
alias bws='brunch watch --server'

If you need to understand in which environment Brunch was run, take a look in process.env.NODE_ENV variable. The content of this variable will be replaced with strings 'production' or 'development' during build time.