[HowTo] Compiling and Setting Up Build Tools

This page is work-in-progress. Please check back later

Prerequisites

cake is coffee's little sister (or so I picture things). If you installed CoffeeScript using npm then you should already have access to it. If you used cake install you have in fact had first-hand experience with the tool.

If you have symlinked bin/coffee to a new location on your $PATH then you should also symlink bin/cake:

$ ln -s /home/stan/public/coffee-script/bin/cake /usr/local/bin/cake

The above assumes /usr/local/bin is in your $PATH.

An empty Cakefile

Running cake outside of CoffeeScript's main directory is much likely to end up throwing an exception and printing out a stack trace. If you look closely, you can see why things don't work just yet:

Error: Cakefile not found in /home/stan/

So, how about we create one:

$ cd ~
$ vim Cakefile

Leave the file empty for the time being. Run cake again:

$ cd ~
$ cake

This should return immediately without printing anything to stdout.

Hello World!

Yes, we are going for the infamous Hello World example, but with a spin -- inside a Cakefile. If you have worked with rake or make then you should already have an idea of how things work. You define a task and use cake [task name] to execute it. Let's get started:

$ cd ~
$ vim Cakefile

Define our task as say:hello:

task 'say:hello', 'Description of task say:hello', ->
  puts 'Hello World!'

Save and exit back to the shell. Next, let's run our newly created task:

$ cake say:hello
Hello World!

If you run cake without any arguments, i.e., no task name you would get a list of all available tasks and their description, neat!

$ cake

cake say:hello             # Description of task say:hello

Try running cake inside CoffeeScript's main directory, observe the same behaviour (but different tasks).