Add package manager and task runner for dependencies

[mashehu]

As brought up in #514 (comment), since we are adding quite a few libraries now, some package management should help us keep it tidy.

Because most of our deps are frontend code, npm would be the easiest choice. If we want to make it extra consistent, we could also use composer for php related stuff.

I think it is easiest if we do all the compiling/moving of the deps inside npm and not add gulp or something similar.

Along with this step, we could actually switch to sass/scss to simplify all the styling (and make the dark mode more consistent) and add an auto-prefixer as well (something like this).
The best would be to add a npm watch to the docker compose command, so the developer doesn't have to start too many things. If we want we could have an npm build github action to be sure that we always have the compiled versions in the github-repo.

[ewels]

+1 for automating as much as possible so that we can effectively forget about the build steps 👍🏻

[ewels]

I finally got around to playing with npm the other day. Got it running with Bootstrap (plus a nice bootstrap dark mode package) and a few other bits in a Docker compose script. Might be able to steal bits of that.

https://github.com/ScilifelabDataCentre/dds_web/tree/dev/dds_web/static

[mashehu]

I have a branch lying around with npm+sass conversion. Unfortunately, how to put it into the docker compose was my problem. I want that it automatically transpiles the files to css on save, but haven't figured out how yet...

[mashehu]

Update: I got it to run (it was looking from the wrong working_dir). Something I can't figure out in your code there: How/when do you trigger npm run build to compile autoprefixed and purged css files?

[mashehu]

Ah, I was too fast. I found it now in the backend dockerfile. 🙂