Angular Material-Start

This Material start* project is a seed for AngularJS Material applications. The project contains a sample AngularJS application and is pre-configured to install the Angular framework and a bunch of development and testing tools for instant web development gratification.

This sample application is intended to be useful as both a learning tool and a skeleton application for a typical AngularJS Material web app: comprised of a Side navigation area and a content area. You can use it to quickly bootstrap your AngularJS webapp projects and dev environment for these projects.

What is the UX?

Below is a snapshot of the Starter-App with the Users' master-detail view. Also shown is the user experience that will is displayed for smaller device sizes. The responsive layout changes to hide the user list, reveal the menu button. In the User Details view, you may also click the share button to show the Contact <User> bottom sheet view.

This Starter app demonstrates how:

Angular Material layout and flex options can easily configure HTML containers
Angular Material components <md-toolbar>, <md-sidenav>, <md-icon> can be quickly used
Custom controllers can use and show <md-bottomsheet> with HTML templates
Custom controller can easily, programmatically open & close the SideNav component.
Responsive breakpoints and $mdMedia are used
Theming can be altered/configured using $mdThemingProvider
ARIA features are supported by Angular Material and warnings can be used to improve accessibility.

Tutorials

The repository contains both ES5 and ES6 versions of the application. Traditional development with ES5 standards and solutions are presented here by default. Tutorials are included: step-by-step instructions that clearly demonstrate how the Starter application can be created in minutes.

These tutorials will be presented live, on-stage at ng-conf 2015, Utah.

Developers should checkout the following repository branches for:

Branch Starter - ES5 Tutorials: for ES5 Tutorial steps & development process.
Branch Starter - ES6: same application as created in the master branch, but implemented with ES6 and JSPM.

The README for the ES6 branch will provide some details showing how easy, more simplifed, and more manageable it is to develop ES6 applications with Angular Material 1.x. As time permits, we will expand on that information.

Getting Started

Prerequisites

You will need git to clone the material-start repository. You can get git from http://git-scm.com/.

We also use a number of node.js tools to initialize and test material-start. You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.

Clone material-start

To get you started you can simply clone master branch from the Material-Start repository and install the dependencies:

NOTE: The master branch contains the traditional, ES5 implementation familiar to Angular developers.

Clone the material-start repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/angular/material-start.git
cd material-start

If you just want to start a new project without the material-start commit history then you can do:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/angular/material-start.git <your-project-name>

The depth=1 tells git to only pull down one commit worth of historical data.

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and AngularJS 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 AngularJS 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 need
app/bower_components - contains the AngularJS framework files

Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but material-start changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a web server.

Run End-to-End Tests

To run your e2e tests your should install and configure Protractor and the Selenium WebServer. These are already specified as npm dependencies within package.json. Simply run these terminal commands:

npm install -g live-server
npm update
webdriver-manager update

Your can read more details about Protractor and e2e here: http://angular.github.io/protractor/#/ for more details on Protractor.

Start your local HTTP Webserver: live-server or http-server.

cd ./app; live-server;

Note: since live-server is working on port 8080, we configure the protractor.conf.js to use baseUrl: 'http://localhost:8080'

In another tab, start a Webdriver instance:

webdriver-manager start

This will start up a Selenium Server and will output a bunch of info logs. Your Protractor test will send requests to this server to control a local browser. You can see information about the status of the server at http://localhost:4444/wd/hub. If you see errors, verify path in e2e-tests/protractor.conf.js for chromeDriver and seleniumServerJar to your local file system.

Run your e2e tests using the test script defined in package.json:

npm test

This uses the local Protractor installed at ./node_modules/protractor

Directory Layout

app/                    --> all of the source files for the application
  assets/app.css        --> default stylesheet
  src/           --> all app specific modules
     users/              --> package for user features
  index.html            --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
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

Updating Angular

Previously we recommended that you merge in changes to angular-seed into your own fork of the project. Now that the AngularJS 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.

Serving the Application Files

While AngularJS is client-side-only technology and it's possible to create AngularJS webapps that don't require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local web server 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://.

Running the App during Development

The angular-seed project comes pre-configured with a local development web server. It is a node.js tool called http-server. You can install http-server globally:

npm install -g live-server

Then you can start your own development web server to serve static files from a folder by running:

cd app
live-server

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.

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out http://angularjs.org/ For more information on Angular Material, check out https://material.angularjs.org/

JonathanBergers/material-start