Concepts

Projects

Most projects are either one of two types: an app or a library. Alfred calls these different project types 'projects'. Alfred uses these project types to determine how it should bundle your project.

Platforms

JavaScript can run on many possible platforms, including NodeJS, the browser, electron, and others. At the moment, Alfred only supports the NodeJS and the browser.

Planned Platform Additions

In the near future, Alfred will add support for electron and react-native platforms. These platforms are not added yet because beacuse they are not supported by any skills yet.

Entrypoints

Entrypoints are files that serve as the 'starting point' of an Alfred project. Alfred entrypoints serve two main purposes:

  • Determine what the platform and project are
  • Serve as the entrypoint for bundlers such as webpack, rollup, and parcel

Here are some examples of entrypoints:

  • lib.browser.js
  • app.node.js
  • app.browser.js

As you can see, entrypoint files always follow the form {project}.{platform}.js. These way of defining entrypoints allows you to easily add multiple entrypoints. Alfred will process each entrypoint with respect to its project and platform.

Targets

A target is simpliy the output of an Alfred build. The output a bundlers depend on three factors: the environment, project, and platform. The environment can either be development, production, or test. Alfred targets are outputted to a targets/{environment}/{project}.{platform}.js directory.

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