This project is an application skeleton for a typical AngularJS web app. You can use it to quickly bootstrap your angular webapp projects and dev environment for these projects.
The seed contains a sample AngularJS application and is preconfigured to install the Angular framework and a bunch of development and testing tools for instant web development gratification.
The seed app doesn't do much, just shows how to wire two controllers and views together.
To get you started you can simply clone the angular-seed repository and install the dependencies:
You need git to clone the angular-seed repository. You can get git from http://git-scm.com/.
We also use a number of node.js tools to initialize and test angular-seed. You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.
Clone the angular-seed repository using git:
git clone https://github.com/quadam/angular-seed.git
cd angular-seed
If you just want to start a new project without the angular-seed commit history then you can do:
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/quadam/angular-seed.git <your-project-name>The depth=1 tells git to only pull down one commit worth of historical data.
We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.
- We get the tools we depend upon via
npm, the node package manager. - We get the angular code via
bower, a client-side code package manager.
We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:
npm install
Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. You should find that you have two new folders in your project.
node_modules- contains the npm packages for the tools we needapp/bower_components- contains the angular framework files
Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but angular-seed changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a webserver.
We have preconfigured the project with a simple development web server. The simplest way to start this server is:
npm start
Now browse to the app at http://localhost:8000/app/index.html.
app/ --> all of the source files for the application
app.css --> default stylesheet
components/ --> all app specific modules
version/ --> version related components
version.js --> version module declaration and basic "version" value service
version_test.js --> "version" value service tests
version-directive.js --> custom directive that returns the current app version
version-directive_test.js --> version directive tests
interpolate-filter.js --> custom interpolation filter
interpolate-filter_test.js --> interpolate filter tests
views/ --> all views go here
view1/ --> the view1 view template and logic
view1.html --> the partial template
view1.js --> the controller logic
view1_test.js --> tests of the controller
view2/ --> the view2 view template and logic
view2.html --> the partial template
view2.js --> the controller logic
view2_test.js --> tests of the controller
app.js --> main application module
index.html --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
index-async.html --> just like index.html, but loads js files asynchronously
karma.conf.js --> config file for running unit tests with Karma
e2e-tests/ --> end-to-end tests
protractor-conf.js --> Protractor config file
scenarios.js --> end-to-end scenarios to be run by Protractor
There are two kinds of tests in the angular-seed application: Unit tests and End to End tests.
The angular-seed app comes preconfigured with unit tests. These are written in Jasmine, which we run with the Karma Test Runner. We provide a Karma configuration file to run them.
- the configuration is found at
karma.conf.js - the unit tests are found next to the code they are testing and are named as
..._test.js.
The easiest way to run the unit tests is to use the supplied npm script:
npm test
This script will start the Karma test runner to execute the unit tests. Moreover, Karma will sit and watch the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them change. This is the recommended strategy; if your unit tests are being run every time you save a file then you receive instant feedback on any changes that break the expected code functionality.
You can also ask Karma to do a single run of the tests and then exit. This is useful if you want to check that a particular version of the code is operating as expected. The project contains a predefined script to do this:
npm run test-single-run
The angular-seed app comes with end-to-end tests, again written in Jasmine. These tests are run with the Protractor End-to-End test runner. It uses native events and has special features for Angular applications.
- the configuration is found at
e2e-tests/protractor-conf.js - the end-to-end tests are found in
e2e-tests/scenarios.js
Protractor simulates interaction with our web app and verifies that the application responds correctly. Therefore, our web server needs to be serving up the application, so that Protractor can interact with it.
npm start
In addition, since Protractor is built upon WebDriver we need to install this. The angular-seed project comes with a predefined script to do this:
npm run update-webdriver
This will download and install the latest version of the stand-alone WebDriver tool.
Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running and WebDriver is updated, you can run the end-to-end tests using the supplied npm script:
npm run protractor
This script will execute the end-to-end tests against the application being hosted on the development server.
Previously we recommended that you merge in changes to angular-seed into your own fork of the project. Now that the angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools instead to update the dependencies.
You can update the tool dependencies by running:
npm update
This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json file.
You can update the Angular dependencies by running:
bower update
This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the bower.json file.
While angular is client-side-only technology and it's possible to create angular webapps that don't require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local webserver during development to avoid issues with security restrictions (sandbox) in browsers. The sandbox implementation varies between browsers, but quite often prevents things like cookies, xhr, etc to function properly when an html page is opened via file:// scheme instead of http://.
The angular-seed project comes preconfigured with a local development webserver. It is a node.js tool called http-server. You can start this webserver with npm start but you may choose to install the tool globally:
sudo npm install -g http-server
Then you can start your own development web server to serve static files from a folder by running:
http-server -a localhost -p 8000
Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own webserver, such as apache or nginx. Just configure your server to serve the files under the app/ directory.
To build the app gulp is used. To install gulp run
npm install gulp-cli -g
and gulp will be installed globally and you can run it from the command line.
In gulpfile.js, change the parameter moduleName if the main module has another name.
Then just run gulp to prepare for production. The result is in the dist/ directory.
To test the production code, run:
npm run protractor-dist
For more information on AngularJS please check out http://angularjs.org/