ng6-exportable-seed

This repo serves as a minimal starter for those looking to get up-and-running with Angular and ES6, using Gulp and Webpack for the build process. This seed is not a Yeoman generator. It's a minimal starter with tasks for building the boilerplate. These are its features:

• The best practice in directory/file organization for Angular (allowing for infinite horizontal app scaling)
• A ready-to-go build system for working with ES6
• Tasks for generating additional boilerplate Angular components
• A full testing system in place
• Pre-configured linting tasks
• Support for stylus, less, sass and plain-old css
• An optional exportable project

Table of Contents

• Walkthrough
  • Build System
  • Testing Setup
• Getting Started
  • Dependencies
  • Installing
  • Running the App
    • Gulp Tasks
    • Testing
    • Generating Components
      

Walkthrough

Build System

NG6 uses Gulp and Webpack together for its build system. Yes, you don't need Gulp if you're using Webpack. This is true if your build system is only responsible for file manipulation. However, ours is not.

Webpack handles all file-related concerns:

• Transpiling from ES6 to ES5 with Babel
• Explicitly define dependencies using ngInject
• Loading HTML files as modules
• Load fonts and icons as Data-Uris
• Transpiling stylesheets and appending them to the DOM
• Refreshing the browser and rebuilding on file changes
• Hot module replacement for transpiled stylesheets
• Bundling the app
• Loading all modules
• Doing all of the above for *.spec.js files as well

Gulp is the orchestrator:

• Starting and calling Webpack
• Starting a development server (yes, Webpack can do this too)
• Generating boilerplate for the Angular app

Testing Setup

All tests are also written in ES6. We use Webpack to take care of the logistics of getting those files to run in the various browsers, just like with our client files. This is our testing stack:

• Karma
• Webpack + Babel
• Jasmine

To run tests, type npm test or karma start in the terminal. Read more about testing below.

Getting Started

Dependencies

Tools needed to run this app:

• node and npm Once you have these, install the following as globals:
  npm install -g gulp karma karma-cli webpack

Installing

• fork this repo
• clone your fork
• npm install -g gulp karma karma-cli webpack install global cli dependencies
• npm install to install dependencies

Running the App

NG6 uses Gulp to build and launch the development environment. After you have installed all dependencies, you may run the app. Running gulp will bundle the app with webpack, launch a development server, and watch all files. The port will be displayed in the terminal.

Gulp Tasks

Here's a list of available tasks:

• export
• serve
• watch
  • alias of serve
• default (which is the default task that runs when typing gulp without providing an argument)
  • runs serve.
• component
  • scaffolds a new Angular component. Read below for usage details.

Testing

To run the tests, run npm test or karma start.

Karma combined with Webpack runs all files matching *.spec.js inside the app folder. This allows us to keep test files local to the component--which keeps us in good faith with continuing to build our app modularly. The file spec.bundle.js is the bundle file for all our spec files that Karma will run.

Be sure to define your *.spec.js files within their corresponding component directory. You must name the spec file like so, [name].spec.js. If you don't want to use the .spec.js suffix, you must change the regex in spec.bundle.js to look for whatever file(s) you want.

Generating Components

Following a consistent directory structure between components offers us the certainty of predictability. We can take advantage of this certainty by creating a gulp task to automate the "instantiation" of our components. The component boilerplate task generates this:

  componentName/
    componentName.js // entry file where all its dependencies load
    componentName.component.js
    componentName.controller.js
    componentName.html
    componentName.styl // scoped to affect only its own template
    componentName.spec.js // contains passing demonstration tests

You may, of course, create these files manually, every time a new module is needed, but that gets quickly tedious.

To generate a component, run gulp component --name componentName.

The parameter following the --name flag is the name of the component to be created. Ensure that it is unique or it will overwrite the preexisting identically-named component.

The component will be created, by default, inside client/app/components. To change this, apply the --parent flag, followed by a path relative to client/app/components/.

For example, running gulp component --name signup --parent auth will create a signup component at client/app/components/auth/signup.

Running gulp component --name footer --parent ../common creates a footer component at client/app/common/footer.

Because the argument to --name applies to the folder name and the actual component name, make sure to camelcase the component names.