Node on Federalist

Federalist supports using node and npm to build your entire site OR to build parts of your site before the build engine starts its work. This is helpful for doing things like compiling a site’s assets, or employing a build tool such as Fractal. To use node exclusively, be sure to set your site engine to ‘node.js’ in your site settings. If you want to use node alongside a different language, such as Jekyll or Hugo, do NOT change the site engine, Federalist will detect the presence of a package.json file and will run the federalist npm script.

The Federalist NPM script

Before running any other generator, the Federalist build engine will check for a package.json file. If it finds one, it will install npm dependencies. Additionally, if the package.json provides a script named federalist, the build engine will run this script. This enables Federalist users to add Javascript dependencies to their site, and run a script to prepare the site for the build engine. If Node.js is the configured Site Engine, no other steps are run.

For more details see package.json examples.

Installing NPM dependencies

Federalist will install dependencies from NPM on your behalf, you should not include a call to npm install from your “federalist” NPM script or anywhere else. In particular, Federalist runs npm ci which means:

• Your project must have a package-lock.json file
• The dependencies in package-lock.json must match those in package.json

See npm-ci and npm-install for more details.

Specifying a Node version

Federalist only supports active and maintenance LTS (Long Term Support) Node releases, the default version is currently v14.x (fermium).

You can specify a different version than the default by providing a file named .nvmrc at the root of your repository containing the desired version of Node. However, if an unsupported version is specified, the build will fail with a helpful error message.

Examples

If the current active and maintenance LTS release versions are 12, 14, and 16:

See .nvmrc for details on how to specify node versions.

Excluding node modules

When Federalist installs dependencies from npm, it creates a directory named node_modules where it saves the installed dependency files. When using Node alongside Jekyll or Hugo, these dependency files may be built into a site if the build is not configured to ignore them. This can cause the time it takes to upload a site to increase significantly.

For example, to ignore the node modules for a Jekyll site, add the following to the site’s _config.yml:

exclude:
  - node_modules

After adding that, jekyll will ignore the node_modules directory when building the site.

Examples

Use Webpack to pre-process javascript

{
  "name": "Webpack example",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "An example Federalist site using webpack",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "build": "`npm bin`/webpack",
    "federalist": "npm run build",
    "start": "`npm bin`/webpack-dev-server"
  },
  "author": "Jonathan Hooper",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "webpack": "^1.14.0"
  },
  ...
}

Use Gatsby to generate a static site

{
  "name": "federalist-gatsby-uswds-template",
  "description": "Description A template for Federalist that uses Gatsby and USWDS 2.0",
  "license": "CC0-1.0",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "author": "davemcorwin",
  "scripts": {
    "develop": "gatsby develop",
    "start": "npm run develop",
    "build": "gatsby build",
    "serve": "gatsby serve",
    "federalist": "npm run build"
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "gatsby": "^2.0.33",
    "react": "^16.5.1",
    "react-dom": "^16.5.1"
  },
  ...
}

Use Node to build an Eleventy site

{
  "name": "federalist-eleventy-template",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "An example Federalist site using eleventy",
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "eleventy --serve",
    "build": "eleventy",
    "federalist": "npm run build",
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dependencies": {
    "@11ty/eleventy": "^0.11.0"
  }
}