Before we dive deep into the rabbit hole of modern-day build tools, let’s first get to know build tools and why Metronic uses them.

What are Build Tools?

In development, you will most likely come across situations where you’ll need to do certain repetitive tasks such as compiling, linking, or packaging code into a more usable or efficient form. In small projects, these tasks are often manually done by the developer to deploy their project for testing or production. However, when it comes to projects on a larger scale, these repetitive tasks could easily take up to 10% of your development time.

This is where build tools come in. Build tools are scripts or programs that automate specific predefined tasks to run your project more efficiently and accurately, such as to include a large number of dependencies in the correct executable sequence in order to package your project into an efficient and optimized application.

Metronic and Build Tools

The latest version of Metronic comes with build tools right out of the box. However, since Metronic was built for a variety of project solutions, our build tool also comes with a flexible configuration template that allows you to fully customize your build output.

You will be able to control dependent plugins, output destination paths, code bundling and so much more to best suit your project requirements.

Why Use Build Tools With Metronic?

In short, accuracy. With Metronic, there is a large number of integrated plugins within its package. However, your project may not need all of it or perhaps it may need more. By defining your dependent plugins within our build tool configuration, you do not need to worry about any human errors appearing during your development cycle or even spend more time than necessary to compile and deploy your compiled assets.

Metronic also supports both Gulp and Webpack build tools for your convenience. It’s all about efficiency and accuracy.

What Benefits Will I Get From Using Metronic’s Build Tools?

Based on Metronic’s countless positive feedback, we’ve come across 3 major key benefits, speed & accuracy.

Speed

By using Metronic’s build tools, developers would not need to worry about compiling SCSS files into CSS, minifying CSS and JS, or bundling all your styles and scripts into a single file for production. This in turn allows developers to focus on the main priorities of the project, which will directly speed up development time.

Accuracy

With build tools, developers will never have to manually include plugins or styles within a project, and if the project has multiple pages with multiple templates, Metronic’s build tools will be able to easily automate to include all the necessary dependencies to specific pages as and when these dependencies are required by running simple key command lines like yarn, gulp, or npm.

Cost

Having a faster development time will, therefore, reduce the total time needed to complete a project, which then reduces the cost needed to keep the development running. By using Metronic, a project will first have 50% of the development time cut in half due to the frontend being complete and ready to deploy. With the inclusion of build tools, the development time gets cut even further by automating all the repetitive tasks to build the project.

Besides development time costs, there is also server costs to host your project. Metronic’s build tools will efficiently minify the project bundle files to efficiently lower down the file size required to upload and host on your production servers. Reducing the unnecessary storage and bandwidth needed for your users to run your application.

Conclusion

Regardless of your project scope is small or large, utilizing build tools within your project will undoubtedly improve your project’s development cycle in terms of speed, accuracy, and cost, which in turn will create a healthier development environment for everyone.