Interbuilder Declarative Build Pipelining

Interbuilder is a workflow and build tool for static web assets and the programs which generate them. It runs multiple programs which write a directory of files, (such as static site generators), and sends them through a data pipeline to make changes to their file trees. If the URL for a static asset is changed, other pages are updated to point to the new value.

Rationale

I've long had an interest in Jamstack, but find it has a limitation: it incentivizes more monolithic codebases on the front-end, which in-turn requires more complicated, less interoperable build tooling and source code.

In the end, almost everything on the web compiles into atomic building blocks like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS; and as long as any URLs written within these standardized formats point to the correct places, they will be understood by browsers.

Interbuilder attempts to re-frame build tools back into this concept, transforming static assets instead of source code, by setting up pipelines to run build processes, collect their static output, manipulate that content directly, and combine these sets of files with the output from other processes which generate assets.

Modern tools shy away from modifying these formats directly, usually opting to generate static assets instead of modifying existing ones. Interbuilder is an exploration of an alternative, providing the means to manipulate their generated content as-is, instead of the origin source code.

For more complicated use cases, such as incremental deployment, I am indending to explore sytems to resolve URL collisions, collecting lists of assets from existing deployment, such as on an S3 bucket, automated source code mutation, and a deployable plugin system to generate executable binaries for production settings.