Gasket Preset Authoring Guide

Background

Much like babel presets, Gasket presets allow common plugins to be grouped and loaded together. They serve 2 purposes: to serve as codified sets of plugins, and to facilitate rapid creation of Gasket application.

At GoDaddy, we have presets specifically tailored with internal sets of plugins, making maintaining standards around authentication, style, analytics, and more significantly easier.

See the naming conventions for how to best name a preset, ensuring that Gasket's plugin engine properly resolves it.

Composition

The anatomy of a preset is very simple. In its most basic form, it should have an index JavaScript file, which can just export an empty object, and a package.json file with dependencies of Gasket plugins.

For example, a package.json file may look like:

{
  "name": "gasket-preset-snl",
  "main": "index.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "plugin-television": "^1.0.0",
    "plugin-live": "^1.0.0",
    "plugin-comedy": "^1.0.0"
  }
}

With an index.js as:

module.exports = {
  require
};

It is recommended, though not required, for presets to export their require instance. This will help the loader properly resolve plugin dependencies, especially during development when module linking may be used.

Predefined create context

You can set gasket create context values ahead of time in your preset so that the associated prompts are never asked. To do so, in a preset's index.js, set the createContext object with the properties you want to define. For example, in the following gasket create prompt, 4 questions are asked at the beginning.

$ gasket create example --presets gasket-preset-example
✔ Load presets
? What is your app description?
? Which packager would you like to use?
? Choose your unit test suite
? Override contents of example? (y/n) y

You can enumerate pre-defined answers to these questions in your preset so that users do not have to answer these questions every time.

// index.js
module.exports = {
  require,
  createContext: {
    appDescription: "In a word? .......chaos",
    packageManager: "npm",
    testPlugin: "none",
    destOverride: false
  }
}

These particular keys come from inspecting the prompts shipped internally by gasket create CLI prompts. Without any extensions, the Gasket CLI ships these overridable prompts:

• appDescription - String
  • Application desciption placed into package.json.description
• packageManager - String
  • Package Manager, typically either npm or yarn
• testPlugin - String
  • What test suite you would like to setup, either mocha, jest, or none
• destOverride - Boolean
  • Whether or not to override the contents of a directory bearing the same name

If you want to override further context, you can inspect any plugin with a prompt lifecycle. For example, this plugin implements a datastore prompt:

// datastore-plugin/prompt-lifecycle.js
module.exports = async function promptHook(gasket, context, { prompt }) {
  if (!('datastore' in context)) {
    const { datastore } = await prompt([
      {
        name: 'datastore',
        message: 'What is the URL for your datastore?',
        type: 'input'
      }]);

    return { ...context, datastore };
  }

  return context;
}

This prompt can be entirely skipped by providing the datastore key in a preset's createContext:

// preset-datastore/index.js
module.exports = {
  require,
  createContext: {
    datastore: 'https://store-of-my-data.com'
  }
};

Predefined gasket.config.js

Presets can also be used to define predetermined config. This will be loaded for app-level commands, such as build or start, and will resolve into the generated application's gasket.config.js.

// index.js
module.exports = {
  require,
  config: {
    https: {
      port: 8443
    },
    environments: {
      local: {
        http: 3000,
        https: null
      }
    }
  }
}

Preset config can also set environment overrides.

Extending other presets

You can also extend other presets by adding them as dependencies to a parent preset. For example, by adding:

{
  "name": "preset-snl",
  "main": "index.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "plugin-television": "^1.0.0",
    "plugin-live": "^1.0.0",
    "plugin-comedy": "^1.0.0"
+   "@tv/preset-episodic": "^45.0.0"
  }
}

@tv/preset-episodic's plugins will be registered when the consuming application is loaded, in addition to the ones already present as dependencies.