[Proposal] Moving files & packages to aurelia-cli

Hey everyone ! 👋

After the default installation of Aurelia with the CLI somes files are created under aurelia_project.

Those are Gulp’s tasks, stubs for generators, environment configuration and the aurelia.json.

I think that those files shouldn’t be managed by the developer. All gulp packages and tasks can be moved inside the CLI and same goes for stubs.

This will allow the aurelia team to manage them easily. Actually, we (devs) need to check with a new installation if tasks has been changed, gulp package updated, etc.

I feel that the current default installation of aurelia with the CLI is kinda bloated cause of that. We will remove 12 packages of the package.json, it will also ensure that aurelia provide the version of package it supports (https://github.com/aurelia/cli/issues/636).

So to resume, my proposal is to…

1. Move all Gulp’s packages to aurelia/cli directly.
2. Move all stubs to aurelia/cli directly.
3. Move all Gulp’s tasks to aurelia/cli directly.
4. Move env’s configuration to aurelia.json.
5. Move aurelia.json to the root of the project.
6. Create a command to “extract” tasks and stubs to be able to custom them (like React eject command).

What do you think?

[JeroenVinke]

Hey @RomainLanz. Having the gulp tasks in the project (as opposed to in the CLI ) allows developers to easily modify and extend them, which many developers do. I believe this is a big plus, and I would like to keep it that way. We can definitely improve the update process, which is tracked in https://github.com/aurelia/cli/issues/231, but we have other priorities to take care of right now.

We’re thinking of a solution where developers can install gulp tasks / generators that they need, where community members can share their tasks and generators so that others can install them. Perhaps we could use versioning of tasks/generators that would help with automatically updating the CLI (as discussed in https://github.com/aurelia/cli/issues/231)

[plwalters]

Currently when starting a new project and using the aurelia-cli you are giving up configurability for convenience. It makes deciding to use the cli a bit of a gamble because once a project starts to grow larger or the team decides to tweak tooling it can be very tough to maintain a large cli project.

As mentioned before, at this point there should be a command in the cli which ejects and moves all of the tasks out of the cli and gives complete control back to the project, cli-free.