LightShip

LightShip is a minimalist starter theme founded on the tenets of simplicity, accessibility, and infrastructure sustainability. It is created and maintained by the team at DevCollaborative.

Our focus is on long-term sustainability of code, and baking in semantic and accessible code wherever we can. Because front-end development tools and frameworks change so quickly, building a theme with many developer tool dependencies can make it harder for other developers, or even future you, to jump back into a front-end codebase down the road.

LightShip does use Sass, with gulp as a taskrunner. The development tools to support Sass are as light as we could make them, so if you prefer to write vanilla CSS, feel free to remove gulp and Sass.

You can read more about the thinking behind LightShip on the DevCollab blog.

Quickly create your custom theme using Starterkit

LightShip is meant to be a starter theme, rather than a contrib parent theme that remains in your codebase. Use Drupal Core's starterkit script to create a new custom theme based on LightShip in a matter of seconds.

To create a new theme based on LightShip using starterkit, execute the following commands:

1. composer require drupal/lightship
2. From the site root, and inserting your new theme's machine name where indicated: php ./core/scripts/drupal generate-theme [theme_name] --starterkit=lightship
3. composer remove drupal/lightship
4. Theme away, you FED wizard, you!

Using Gulp

Setup

See this more in-depth overview and guide.

From the theme’s directory, run npm install --save-dev

Gulp Tasks

• gulp sass - compiles sass into CSS
• gulp clean:css - deletes compiled CSS
• gulp watch - watches sass directories for changes and recompiles whenever you save a change
• gulp build - simple one time build task

Why doesn’t gulp do ALL THE THINGS?

This is by design, and at the core of LightShip's mission. We reduce complexity and development abstractions so that later on, in 2-5 years' time, it's not difficult to reproduce this development environment.