Angular Template

This template provides a starter project that implements best practices in coding, building and testing AngularJS applications. Features include:

A well-organized component hierarchy starting from approot. Components are implemented using directives (no dangling controllers). This provides a good architectural direction until Angular 2.0 becomes available.
Follows AngularJS style guidelines (e.g. controller as syntax).
Uses Angular UI-Router for flexible routing and nested views.
Uses Angular Bootstrap to remove dependencies on jQuery and Bootstrap’s JavaScript.
Provides logging and exception handling frameworks with toaster notifications.
Provides a Gulp-based build system – code changes are reflected in the browser immediately.
Uses Karma, Mocha and Chai for testing.

Requirements

Install Node
- on OSX, install homebrew and type brew install node
- on Windows, use the installer available at nodejs.org
- On OSX you can alleviate the need to run as sudo by following John Papa's instructions
Open terminal
Type npm install -g node-inspector bower gulp

Quick Start

Clone this repo and run the content locally:

$ npm install
$ gulp serve-dev

npm install will install the required node libraries under node_modules and then call bower install which will install the required client-side libraries under bower_components.
gulp serve-dev will serve up the Angular application in a browser window. It is designed for an efficient development process. As you make changes to the code, the browser will update to reflect the changes immediately.

When you are ready to build the application for production, run the following command:

$ gulp serve-build

This will build a production-ready package in the /build folder.

Folder Structure

The folder structure is somewhat simplified and flatter compared to John Papa's Gulp Patterns project. The description below includes reasons for some of my customizations.

Highest Level Structure

/bower_components
/build
/node_modules
/src
/test

bower_components: Bower components downloaded by bower install (do not check in)
build: Production build (do not check in)
node_modules: Node.js modules downloaded by npm install (do not check in)
src: contains all the client source files including HTML, styles (in Sass format), JavaScript and images
test: contains client tests. This folder is intentionally kept separate from client source because I expect many different types of tests in this folder (unit, integration, acceptance). In production projects, the number of test files can easily exceed the number of source files, so I like to keep the clutter away from the real source - just my preference!

Source Folder Structure

/src
    /components
    /core
    /framework
    /images
    /app.module.js
    /app.scss
    /index.html

The src folder contains only the source for the AngularJS client application. It treats all 3 web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) as first class citizens and arranges them into logical modules. At the highest level you will find the main html, css (well, scss) and js files:

index.html
app.scss
app.module.js

Below this level you will find several directories that arrange the application's functionality into logical modules.

framework: Container for reusable services such as logging, exception handling, routing, security, local storage etc. These services are expected to work out-of-the-box without any changes for most applications. The template provides sample implementations for the first three. (This folder is called blocks in the gulp-patterns project.)
core: Contains functionality that is shared across the application and will probably need customization for a specific application. This includes directives, filters and services and styles common to the entire application.
components: Contains all the components of the application. We recommend thinking of an Angular application as a tree of components, starting with the app component as the root of this tree.
images: Images used in the application.

Gulp Tasks

List Tasks

gulp help

Displays all of the available gulp tasks.

Code Analysis

gulp vet

Performs static code analysis on all javascript files. Runs jshint and jscs.
gulp vet --verbose

Displays all files affected and extended information about the code analysis.
gulp plato

Performs code analysis using plato on all javascript files. Plato generates a report in the reports folder.

Testing

gulp test

Runs all unit tests using karma runner, mocha, chai and sinon with phantomjs. Depends on vet task, for code analysis.
gulp autotest

Runs a watch to run all unit tests.

Cleaning Up

gulp clean

Remove all files from the build and temp folders
gulp clean-images

Remove all images from the build folder
gulp clean-code

Remove all javascript and html from the build folder
gulp clean-fonts

Remove all fonts from the build folder
gulp clean-styles

Remove all styles from the build folder

Fonts and Images

gulp fonts

Copy all fonts from source to the build folder
gulp images

Copy all images from source to the build folder

Styles

gulp styles

Compile Sass files to CSS, add vendor prefixes, and copy to the build folder

Angular HTML Templates

gulp templatecache

Create an Angular module that adds all HTML templates to Angular's $templateCache. This pre-fetches all HTML templates saving XHR calls for the HTML.
gulp templatecache --verbose

Displays all files affected by the task.

Serving Development Code

gulp serve-dev

Serves the development code and launches it in a browser. To keep development moving efficiently, development builds should occur as quickly as possible. This task aids that goal by serving all code from the source folders and compiling Sass to CSS in a temporary folder.

Building Production Code

gulp html

Optimize all javascript and styles, move to a build folder, and inject them into the new index.html
gulp build

Copies all fonts, copies images and runs gulp html to build the production code to the build folder.

Serving Production Code

gulp serve-build

Serve the optimized code from the build folder and launch it in a browser.

Gabrielmtn/front-end-sandbox