NOTE: The newer https://github.com/imba/imba-vite-template is recommended for new projects. This repo will stay around as an ESBuild bundler alternative, but may not see many updates as we focus on Vite moving forwards.

Building Imba for static hosting

This is a starting point for building Imba to be hosted statically. It can also be used to build Imba into a native app with imbutter.

Original build.js script is here: https://gist.github.com/trafnar/05ebbf0f5193e69f998f41b154d18190

Available Scripts

In the project directory, you can run:

npm start

Runs the app in the development mode. Open http://localhost:3000 to view it in the browser.

The page will reload if you make edits. You will also see any lint errors in the console.

npm run build

Builds the app for production to the dist folder.

Note that dist/html is the static version.

Deployment

Github Pages

TLDR

Create a new github repository and replace YOUR_NEW_GITHUB_REPO_URL with your new repo's url.

npx imba create project_name
cd project_name
git add --all
git commit -m "initial commit"
git remote add origin YOUR_NEW_GITHUB_REPO_URL
git push -u origin main

npx imba build --baseurl . server.imba
npx touch dist/public/.nojekyll
npx gh-pages --no-history --dotfiles --dist dist/public

To find the URL your project has been deployed to, navigate to the Pages tab of your repo's settings.

Explanation

For static hosting, we build using . as the baseurl.

npx imba build --baseurl . server.imba

Yes, we still build using the server.imba file even though we won't be using any of the server-side files.

Since Github Pages uses Jekyll by default, paths starting with underscores (like __assets__) will fail to load, so we have to that specify we don't want to use Jekyll by doing:

npx touch dist/public/.nojekyll

Once all of that is settled, actually deploying to github pages is really easy with npx gh-pages, which will create a new git branch named gh-pages and serve our files from there by default.

• For our purposes, it's important to specify --dotfiles because of the necessary .nojekyll file.
• We also want to use dist/public as the base directory.
• Since we don't need the gh-pages branch for actual version control, I prefer to use the --no-history flag as well.

npx gh-pages --no-history --dotfiles --dist dist/public