Here at Kanopi, our amazing team of developers constantly works to not only create value for our clients but also contribute to the greater open-source communities of the development platforms we work with. With this in mind, we are excited to present Kanopi Pack, a new open-source tool for developers looking to simplify their workflows.
Pre-Kanopi Pack
Developers often turn to tools like Grunt or Gulp to automate and manage repetitive tasks and static assets. These tools automate the process of creating your production scripts and styles from source files. However, they come with a few drawbacks. They can require significant configuration, which is time-consuming, error-prone, and can become a mini-project of its own to maintain.
As you bring new dependencies and packages into the ecosystem, you add boilerplate configuration and make design decisions, adding complexity. Your maintenance needs can scale quickly as you have to manage updates for each of these libraries.
Further, you may need a small application, such as a calculator, on your site. Tools like Grunt and Gulp don’t offer modern support to build and manage a React or Vue application. These applications become separate projects, with their own additional sets of configurations and libraries to manage. Typically, they require you to run the application in a self-contained environment, making integration and deployment a challenge.
At an agency, you may have 100+ projects to work on and maintain every month across multiple teams. The question becomes, how do you manage these libraries sustainably while allowing your teams to work with a common configuration and providing a sensible amount of flexibility?
What is Kanopi Pack?
Kanopi Pack is a toolkit designed to streamline package management and enable modern web projects or revitalize older projects with an aging toolkit. Kanopi Pack currently uses Webpack and consolidates management of its features and configuration into a single package, with an additional package at present for either React or Vue.
Let’s say you’ve managed a WordPress website over the years. You may have updated a plugin that unintentionally broke something. Similarly, when you have multiple packages running at the same time, your project can break many times.
Instead of running maintenance on one package at a time, with Kanopi Pack, you can conduct maintenance once across many packages. This saves time and minimizes testing.
You are free to add or continue using additional packages in your project, provided they work in a modern JavaScript environment. There can be package mismatches or configurations from these additional packages you need to address, though this helps consolidate the troubleshooting scope.
On the front end, Kanopi Pack provides a fully documented configuration file to tailor features for a specific project. You can install Kanopi Pack via Node Package Manager (NPM) anywhere in your project structure. For PHP-based applications, like Drupal or WordPress, you can install Kanopi Pack Asset Loader with Composer (Packagist) to manage registering the scripts and stylesheets in the application.
Why should you use Kanopi Pack?
Other consolidation tools promote the idea that you must install 20-30 packages to streamline your team’s workflow. Kanopi Pack is a free, open-source tool that allows you to manage multiple dependencies through one module.
If you’re looking to refresh your outdated tech or keep your new build projects lean, Kanopi Pack is a useful infrastructure package to add to your toolbox.
Keeping up with the Kanopi team
Our team is committed to helping developers streamline their work by making projects more adaptable and easy to maintain. We value collaboration and contributing workable solutions like Kanopi Pack to our communities. Browse our GitHub to get a sense of what our other repositories can do.
If our philosophy resonates with you, reach out to us today to learn more about our team.
