Specification for reusable AngularJS components
Attention: This document is a WIP! Since we want to collect as many opinions as possible, feel free to fork and send a Pull Request. We hope that once this specification is called final, developers of angular components will do things the same way, which will allow the Angular Team to provide better tooling.
Preface
This specification should help you as a developer, as well as a consumer of Angular components, to find, use and develop reusable Angular components. Angular components are distributed as Bower packages. See bower.io for more information.
It has two parts:
The consumer perspective covers all topics on finding and using Angular components, whereas the creator or forker part gives an in-depth description of how to create, structure and publish an Angular component, as well as which naming conventions to follow for the component itself and the resulting bower package.
Dependencies
This specification also expects that needed tools are already installed and ready to use. Which means the following commands should be used to install the needed tools on a local machine:
Node Package Manager
Visit https://nodejs.org/download/
Bower Package Manager
$ npm install -g bower
Definitions in this specification
This specification contains expressions like components, packages and modules. These are the definitions:
Component
Component is a Bower concept. A component is a repo which contains some files for client-side use in a web browser. This may include, but is not limited to, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and images. A Bower component has a component.json (or bower.json) file that describes the component and its dependencies.
Package
Package is a Bower concept. For the time being, one can think of the terms package and component as being interchangeable in the context of Bower. In general, package is the thing that you can download, and contains a component, which is a group of one or more assets. Saying one can think of them as interchangeable for now, is because there's a one-to-one correspondence of package to component.
Module
When the word module appears, this specification means an AngularJS module. An AngularJS module may have multiple directives, services, or filters. For components, each module typically has its own file. Bower components typically contain just one AngularJS module, though in theory there can be more.
AngularJS Components Consumer
This part of the Reusable AngularJS components specification is highly inspired by @btford 's blog post.
Table Of Contents
Naming Conventions
Registered Angular components
To make searching and filtering for Angular components with Bower as easy as possible, the name under which Angular components get registered should match the following pattern.
angular-[optional-namespace]-[thing-name]-[optional-thing-type]
Name should be prefixed with angular-.
optional-namespace
Can be used to group similar components such as
angular-phonegap-ready
angular-phonegap-geolocation
thing-name
This is the actual module name.
It should match the functionality of the module.
E.g. the geolocation in angular-phonegap-geolocation.
Or the translate in angular-translate.
optional-thing-type
Could be filter, directive or service.
This is for clarification if [thing-name] isn't enough.
Searching and Finding
Search for packages
Since registered Angular components follow a naming convention, finding them can be achieved by simply searching for all registered Bower packages which have an angular in their registry name.
$ bower search angular
Should return a list of registered bower packages with an angular in their name.
Finding packages with keywords
Bower doesn't currently support a search with keywords.
Filtering packages by keyboard can be done by using bower search in combination with the grep command.
So the following command searches for Angular packages with the keyword "phonegap".
$ bower search angular | grep "phonegap"
Installing packages
Once the right package is found, one can install it using the Bower install command.
E.g. installing AngularJS itself as a package would look like this:
$ bower install angular
This will download the specified package into the folder which is configured as components folder via .bowerrc.
Installing unregistered packages
It is possible that there's an AngularJS component on GitHub, which is not registered as bower component. This could have several reasons:
- The author doesn't plan to publish it as a Bower component
- The name the author wants to register it is already been taken
- The package is actually registered but the endpoint is broken (which unfortunately happens often, and there's currently no way to take care of that as a package maintainer. See bower/bower#120
In that cases one can install the package by specifying the GitHub user and the repository. This works for every GitHub repository.
$ bower install <username>/<repository>