Sitecore SXA CLI tips & tricks

I've been working with SXA themes recently and came across this great blog post by Serge van den Oever on creating a custom theme for SXA using SXA CLI and wanted to share a few extra tips on top of it.

NodeJS version
SXA CLI (specifically, Gulp 3.9.1) does not play well with Node version > 11 (the latest is 13) and will fail with "ReferenceError: primordials is not defined" error. One way of fixing it is using Node Version Switcher, but there is also a little trick I found on StackOverflow. You just need to create a npm-shrinkwrap.json file containing this:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "graceful-fs": {
      "version": "4.2.2"
    }
  }
}

before running NPM install.

Initial build & deploy
If you run standard "gulp default" task after the fresh checkout and you've excluded .css files from GIT - the task will silently fail to upload optimized style sheets.But there are few built-in commands that help you fix it - just run "gulp sassComponents" and "gulp sassStyles" before "gulp default" and SXA CLI will pre-generate .css for all .scss components.

Hope this helps you get started with the tool. I will update the post with additional hints, you're welcome to share yours in the comments!