Visualisation template

This repository is a simple template and workflow for developing interactive data visualisations with modern JavaScript using Node.js, Babel, rollup and D3. The aim is to be able to use the latest features of JavaScript, while generating code that works across a wide range of browsers. You will need to have Node.js installed.

D3 support

The template now supports D3 version 7. As D3 has fully adopted ES2015, D3 modules in the node_modules folder are now transpiled along with your own source code when you build the production bundle. If you are using D3 version 5 or earlier and don't need to transpile D3, you should change the regular expression that is used as the exclusion rule for babel-loader on line 26 of rollup.config.js to the following:

/node_modules\/(?!(?!(whatwg-fetch)\/).*/

Quick setup

The easiest way of using the template is to clone this repository into a new project directory and install the required modules using the pre-defined package.json.

1. Clone the repository into a project directory.

git clone https://github.com/olihawkins/vis-template my-project

2. Change into the project directory.

cd my-project

3. Remove the git files.

rm -rf .git .gitignore LICENSE readme.md

4. Install from package.json.

npm install

Manual setup

An alternative method involves manually downloading the latest versions of the packages. This may be useful if you want to upgrade to newer versions of the packages, or customise the setup in other ways.

1. Clone the repository into a project directory.

git clone https://github.com/olihawkins/vis-template my-project

2. Change into the project directory.

cd my-project

4. Remove the git files and the existing package.json files.

rm -rf .git .gitignore LICENSE readme.md package.json package-lock.json

5. Initialise the project folder with npm to create a new package.json.

npm init

6. Install the development dependencies.

npm install --save-dev @babel/core @babel/plugin-transform-runtime @babel/preset-env rollup @rollup/plugin-babel rollup-plugin-terser @rollup/plugin-commonjs @rollup/plugin-node-resolve rollup-plugin-serve eslint

7. Install the package dependencies.

npm install --save @babel/runtime @babel/runtime-corejs3 whatwg-fetch d3

8. Open package.json and add the following entries to scripts (above the entry for test).

"build": "rollup -c --watch",

Development

The src directory contains the input JavaScript source file index.js, while the dist directory contains the index.html webpage. Once you have set up the workflow you can edit src/index.js and dist/index.html to develop your visualisation.

To begin development, start rollup and navigate to localhost:10001 in your browser.

npm run build

Rollup transpiles and bundles src/index.js as dist/index.min.js, including any modules index.js imports.

In its initial state, index.js contains some example code, which checks that rollup, Babel and D3 are working correctly. Replace this with your visualisation code.

Note that D3 needs the whatwg-fetch polyfill for d3-fetch functions to work in older browsers. All other polyfills are handled automatically by Babel and core-js.

You can optionally create a .eslintrc for the project if you use linting in your text editor.

./node_modules/.bin/eslint --init

Technologies

This is a simple setup. You can configure rollup to do a lot more than this. More information on the technologies used for this workflow can be found in the documentation.