What is this project?

This project is a baseline template for making Adobe CEP extensions based on how I like to code and how I think they should be organized and written. It also provides or does the following:

1. Clone the code anywhere on your machine and the grunt script will automatically deploy it into the CEP extensions directory.
2. The code has been architected in a way that you can manage DEBUG and RELEASE builds of your extension easily. Debug builds are deployed in a way that makes for easy debugging. Release builds reference files that are sensibly stitched, minified, etc.
3. Packaging and signing of the code is happening automatically on every grunt run for simplicity and ease of use. I'll do this more smartly later.
4. A very minimal architecture that handles automatic theming (based on Adobe's CEP samples) and a few helper classes to ease interop with JSX code.

The code in the repo has only been tested to work with After Effects 2014 and 2015 on OSX. I'm fairly certain this project will work out of thebox for Windows but it has never been tested and there's no automation around Windows either. If anyone wants to take that on I'd be stoked!

This is a work in progress and will become better and more complete over time. Here's a quick list of things I'd like to see happen with it:

1. Organize the code in a more modular fashion perhaps more like a jquery or node js module.
2. Automate the creation of a pkg installer to make distribution easier for people working on small internal projects
3. Combile all statically loaded jsx files into a single jsxbin file.
4. Version bump in a sensible way for automated deployment.
5. Have a story around adding an existing certificate.
6. Not produce a new self-signed cert on every run (not a big deal)

How to get started

1. Grab the code

$ git clone https://github.com/khanyuinc/cep-template.git
$ cd cep-template
$ npm install
$ grunt

1. Restart After Effects (or Photoshop, etc.)
2. Make something cool (see Development Workflow below for details).
3. Make a release build

$ grunt release

1. Make an installer and distribute it.

Notes

1. The grunt file automatically creates a new self-signed certificate every time you make a new build. This is completely overkill but I did it for the ease of use for now and will probably make it smarter later.

Development Workflow

1. Edit the files in the src directory.
2. From the terminal run grunt.
3. Test the extension in your target product(s) (i.e. After Effects, etc.).
4. Repeat