Build Process

Dependency Management

Gibbon uses PHP's dependency manager Composer to manage and install required libraries and dependencies in the vendor folder, when are then auto-loaded into the available namespaces.

Before installing Gibbon make sure you have composer installed on your server. Follow the Getting Started guides on the composer website for more instructions about how to do this.

Using composer, navigate to your root Gibbon folder and run the composer install command once to install all required libraries. You can also run composer install --no-dev to exclude any libraries that are used solely for development and testing.

Front-end Build

As of v18 Gibbon uses Webpack configured with Tailwind CSS via the Laravel Mix tool. More info about Tailwind in Gibbon here.

For the most part developers won't need to re-build the css files too often, as the utility classes in Tailwind provide lots of functionality out of the box. However during refactoring while we're creating some initial components, developers can use the build process to update css and js files for Gibbon core.

Using the build tools

If you don't have npm, be sure to install it first. On Mac OS, if you have Homebrew you can install npm with brew install node.

In the command line, browse to the resources/build directory from your Gibbon install location, then run npm install to setup the build tools.

Once this is done, you can run npm run build to build the files, or npm run watch to automatically build files anytime they're changed.