vue-2-boilerplate

A boilerplate for building medium to large Vue 2 single page applications

This boilerplate is based on the Vue webpack template. Common topics are discussed in the VueJS docs. Make sure to read it!

Usage

To get up and running run:

$ npm install
$ npm run dev

Yes, that's it. Only two commands!

If you still think that's too much effort, you could also run:

$ npm i && npm run dev

But yeah, this will basically do the same as npm install. If even this is too much of a deal, try creating an alias and bind npm install && npm run dev to npmid.

Configuration

Wait a minute, you just said that I only need to run npm install? What's this? I need to do more?

Yeah, to get up and running real quick, npm install is enough. But if you want to, let's say, connect to an external API, there's a little bit more involved. You need to configure your application a bit more, explained below:

Config files

Inside the config/*.env.js-files, you can configure your environment variables. Out of the box the applications comes bundled with AJAX-support. The only thing you need to do is change API_LOCATION environment variable. If you want to use OAuth 2, you can set the API_CLIENT_ID and API_CLIENT_SECRET here as well.

Are you in dev-mode and want to use different values than your production mode? No problem! Just copy the config from the prod.env.js-file and paste them in the dev.env.js-file. Edit the values and you're good to go!

For more information, visit the docs.

What's included

npm run dev: first-in-class development experience.
- Webpack + vue-loader for single file Vue components.
- State preserving hot-reload
- State preserving compilation error overlay
- Lint-on-save with ESLint
- Source maps
npm run build: Production ready build.
- JavaScript minified with UglifyJS.
- HTML minified with html-minifier.
- CSS across all components extracted into a single file and minified with cssnano.
- All static assets compiled with version hashes for efficient long-term caching, and a production index.html is auto-generated with proper URLs to these generated assets.
npm run unit: start the Karma Test Runner.
- Unit Tests are provided by Karma, Mocha, Chai and Sinon-Chai.
- The testing files should be place under test/unit/specs.
- Make sure every test file ends in .spec.js
npm run e2e: start the Nightwatch Test Runner.
- End to End (e2e) Tests are provided by Nightwatch, Selenium and PhantomJS.
- The testing files should be place under test/e2e/specs.

Other tools

Scaffolding

For quickly scaffolding components, pages, layouts and more, install the Vueture CLI tool.

$ npm install -g vueture-cli

Important Files

So there are two important files that needs to be addressed:

main.js

This file will load your single page application and bootstrap all the plugins that are used. It will also serve as the entry point which will be loaded and compiled using webpack.

app/index.vue

The main Vue file. This file will load the page inside the router-view-component. It will check if the user is authenticated and load the resources accordingly.

Directory Structure

Inside the src-directory, are a couple directories that needs to be addressed:

Components

Your components will be placed inside this directory. As you can see, this boilerplate comes already shipped with a pre-made card component.

Layouts

Your layout files will be placed inside this directory. When you are building a large single page application, you will be using different layouts. For instance, your login-page or register-page will have a different layout than your account-page.

The boilerplate comes out of the box with two layouts included. A minimal layout, used for the login and register page, and a default layout, used for the home and account page.

Mixins

The mixins you want to use with Vue will be placed inside this directory.

Inside the mixins directory is a slot-mixin. This mixin will add the hasSlot()-method to all the components it is used in.

Pages

The pages are placed inside this directory. By default it comes with an account/index.vue, home/index.vue, login/index.vue and a register/index.vue page, but feel free to add more.

Plugins

This boilerplate comes with a couple of plugins you can use. It will load and configure:

vue
vue-router
vue-i18n
vuex
vuex-router-sync
axios
bootstrap
font-awesome

Don't like one of those plugins? Just remove the file from the plugins-directory and remove the entry from the main.js-file. Also make sure to remove the package and dependencies from the package.json-file.

Proxies

Proxies are used to perform AJAX-requests. This boilerplate comes with a base proxy which can be used to make performing AJAX-requests fairly easy. Create a new proxy, for example UserProxy, and extend the Proxy. This way you've got access to the all, find, update, create and destroy methods. The boilerplate comes with an AccountProxy and AuthProxy by default.

Routes

In this directory you can specify the routes that are used by this application. VueRouter loads the routes located in this directory.

Store

As mentioned before, Vuex is used as a single point of truth. To learn more about Vuex, visit the documentation

Transformers

Transformers are used to transform the incoming and outgoing requests. If you have an API where you can retrieve posts from, a post wil look something like this:

{
  "id" : 1,
  "title" : "Hello World!",
  "content" : "Lorem Ipsum",
  "created_at" : "today"
}

However, it feels weird to use snake_cased variables inside your camelCased application. This is where transformers come in. So given the previous example, using a transformer, it will look something like this:

{
  "id" : 1,
  "title" : "Hello World!",
  "content" : "Lorem Ipsum",
  "createdAt" : "today"
}

Utils

Here you can place handy utils you want to use inside your application.

Test

Both the Unit Tests and the End-2-End Tests are within the test/ folder. Unit Tests should go inside the test/unit/specs folder. E2e Tests should go inside the test/e2e/specs folder. You can read more about both test on the Webpack Boilerplate Testing Session.

Got questions or improvements?

Feel free to hit me up on:

Or create an issue

Fork It And Make Your Own

What are you waiting for?! Make something awesome!

License

The MIT License (MIT)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

eeandrew/vue-2-boilerplate