This boilerplate is the product of much research and frustration. Existing boilerplates freely modify Backbone core, lack a build process, and are very prescriptive; Backbone Boilerplate changes that.

The Backbone Boilerplate is a way of organizing a web application with some opinionated defaults, such as: Backbone, jQuery, Lodash, Grunt, Babel, Combyne, Karma, Mocha, and PureCSS for styles.

Organize your application with a logical file structure, develop your Models/Collections/Views/Routers inside modules, and build knowing you have efficient code that will not bottleneck your users.

Thanks to our Contributors! Special Thanks to: cowboy, iros, nimbupani, wookiehangover, and jugglinmike for helping me create this project. Extra Special Thanks to: Paul Guinan for giving me usage rights to his fantastic Boilerplate character.

Backbone Boilerplate Wiki

The easiest way to get started is to install Git and clone the repository:

# Using Git, fetch only the latest commits.  You won't need the full history
# for your project.
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/tbranyen/backbone-boilerplate

# Move the repository to your own project name.
mv backbone-boilerplate my-project

You will need to download and install Node to fetch the dependencies and use the build tools.

Third party packages may update independently from this main repo, so it's a good idea to update after fetching.

npm install

The build process consists of numerous Grunt plugin tasks that work together to optimize your application.

# To run the build process, run the NPM start script. This will automatically
# run JSHint, the development Connect server, and watch your files for changes.
npm start

# Run a build and test the now optimized assets.
npm run test-prod

Ceate an ES6 module in the test/tests directory and add an import in the test/runner.js file. You'll see existing examples in there to make it easy to follow.

Run the tests with:

npm test

If you want to continuously test, run npm start and open the test/index.html file in your browser. The tests will re-run whenever you change source files.

By default, the test runner is BDD Mocha and uses Node's assert.

Copyright © 2015 Tim Branyen (@tbranyen)
Licensed under the MIT license.