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Mole is a platform agnostic preprocessor that allows you to create your own design system framework.

It's main features are:

• Bare bones library to create your own framework
• Multiple use cases from creating design tokens, to CSS frameworks, to something else entirely
• Simple, flexible, automatic template choosing, optional named outputs

Mole is currently in alpha and it's features are still evolving. If you'd like to contribute to it's progress please see the contributing guidelines for how you can help.

Setup your project and install mole as a dependency. Use @next for the next alpha release.

npm install mole@next --save-dev

Build output files using

mole.build()

Configure mole using one of the methods below.

See the examples for different ways of configuring your project.

By default mole will look for a file called mole.config.js at the root of your project, you can override this using mole.config().

An example of a config file

// mole.config.js
module.exports = {
    theme: 'theme.js', // The path of your theme file (supports .js and .jsonnet) 
    model: ['model-name'], // The name or path of any models you want to use (optional)
    template: ['template-name'], // The name or path of any templates you want to use
    output: [ // You can have one or more outputs
        { css: { file: 'styles.css' } }, 
        { ios: { file: 'styles.h' } },
        { android: { file: 'styles.xml' } }
    ]
}

An example of manually setting the location of the config file

mole.config('src/mole.config.js')

A theme is a file used to describe different design decisions, characteristics, traits or tokens. Mole is fairly unopinionated about how you use it so you can structure your theme data how you like. In fact a theme is completely optional if you prefer.

Below is a trivial example of a theme

{
    font: {
        size: [
            16,
            19,
            22,
            26,
            30,
            35
        ]
    }
}

Theme data is accessible inside models and is immutable from inside them. When you create a model this returns an object which updates the main model and is then available to use by templates when they are rendered.

To avoid logic responsible for describing certain design characteristics being stored in models, you can can describe theme data using a more expressive method using Jsonnet which includes functions from it's standard library.

Example using Jsonnet

{
    font: {
        size: [
            std.ceil(16 * std.pow($.number['golden ratio'], n))
            for n in std.range(0, 5)
        ]
    }
}

Models allow you to create a data structure from theme data so it can be used by different templates for different platforms and languages.

When more than one model is assigned to an output the data from each model is merged together.

To create a named model

mole.create('model', 'model-name', (theme) => {

    // Create a data model by modifying the theme data
    model = theme.red
    
    return model
})

Templates allow you to format data for a specific platform or language. You can create templates by either using template strings (using Nunjucks) or a function.

When multiple templates are specified the strings from each template are merged into one.

To create a template using a function

mole.create('template', 'template-name', (theme, model) => {

    let utility = model.font.size
    let string = ''

    for (let i = 0; i < utility.length; i++) {
        let value = utility[i]
		string += `.$font-${i} {\n`
		string += ` font-size: ${value}\n`
		string += `}\n`
    }
    
    return string
})

To create a template using a template string

mole.create('template', 'template-name',

    `.font-{{modifier}} {
        font-size: {{value}};
    }`
})

To install

npm install mole@next --save-dev

To run/compile

npm run build

To test

npm run test

To test and watch for changes

npm run dev