Angular-starter

Overview

Angular-starter is a mildly opinionated boilerplate for MEAN stack web development, with tools for building a great experience across many devices. Designed to build productive programmers.

Features

Feature	Summary
Auto-Injection	Seamlessly integrated with gulp-inject, newly compiled CSS files, all necessary AngularJS files, and Bower components are automatically injected directly into `index.html` so your code just works. No more fumbling through `<script>` tags.
Built-in Express Server	Simple Express server complete with body-parser, morgan, and mongoose pre-configured. (Run `npm start` to start with gulp-nodemon)
Cross-device Synchronization	Synchronize clicks, scrolls, forms and live-reload across multiple devices as you edit your project. Powered by BrowserSync. (Run `npm start` and open up the IP provided on other devices on your network)
Sass support	Compile Sass into CSS with ease, bringing support for variables, mixins and more. (Run `gulp styles` to compile, or just `gulp` to compile and auto-inject CSS files into `index.html`)

Prerequisites

Node.js and npm are essential to Angular development.

Get it now if it's not already installed on your machine.

Verify that you are running at least node v4.x.x and npm 3.x.x by running node -v and npm -v in a terminal/console window. Older versions produce errors.

Create a new project based on the QuickStart

Clone this repo into new project folder (e.g., my-proj).

git clone https://github.com/morgansliman/angular-starter my-proj
cd my-proj

Install dependencies

See npm version notes above

Install the npm packages described in the package.json:

npm install

The npm install command will first install all dependencies listed in package.json, then it will call bower install to install the front-end dependencies listed in bower.json (AngularJS & UI-Router by default).

When Bower finishes installing its packages, it will call gulp inject-bower which will inject the newly installed dependencies into src/client/index.html automatically.

When installing additional packages with bower, always check your index.html file to be sure they were injected correctly. This code is not perfect yet; please open an issue if you find an error in your dependency injections.

Delete non-essential files

You can quickly delete the non-essential files (.git) by entering the following command while in the project folder:

Note: this will also delete the README.md file. If you're reading this in your IDE, open it in a browser first!

gulp renew

Note: For now, you will still need to manually edit the information inside of package.json and bower.json. (i.e., name, description, keywords, etc.)

Create a new git repo

You could start writing code now and throw it all away when you're done. If you'd rather preserve your work under source control, consider taking the following steps.

Initialize this project as a local git repo and make the first commit:

git init
git add .
git commit -m "Initial commit"

Create a remote repository for this project on the service of your choice.

Grab its address (e.g. https://github.com/<my-profile>/my-proj.git) and push the local repo to the remote.

git remote add origin <repo-address>
git push -u origin master

Start the app and verify that it works

Start the app:

npm start

The npm start command first compiles any .sass or .scss files within src/client/sass then auto-injects these along with all your custom AngularJS into the appropriate places in index.html then simultaneously re-compiles and runs the Express server in src/server/index.js using gulp-nodemon.

Changes made to any .js, .sass, or .scss files are tracked by gulp-nodemon and will restart the server, triggering a Sass re-compile and full auto-injection. Changes made to any .html file is tracked by BrowserSync, and will automatically live-reload the page. If this isn't working as expected, please open an issue.

Verify that it works:

Try changing the <h1> tag inside of src/client/index.html and watch your browser live-reload your changes when the file is saved!

During startup, BrowserSync logs several IP adresses to the console. Open the appropriate address in another device (connected to the same network) and watch your changes live-reload to all browser instances at the same time! This makes testing your app in multiple environments much easier. (read more about BrowserSync)

Shutdown

Shut it down manually with Ctrl-C.

Congrats! You're ready to write your application.

Usage

Command list (in no specific order):

gulp - Compile Sass and auto-inject CSS/JS files into index.html
gulp styles - Compile Sass (does not auto-inject)
gulp inject - Auto-injects CSS/JS files from src/client/app into index.html
gulp inject-bower - You shouldn't ever need to call this directly; automatically run by Bower after installing a new package
bower install - Use this command to install new front-end dependencies to src/client/lib (auto runs gulp inject-bower postinstall)
npm install - Used as normal (will also run bower install if there are uninstalled dependencies listed in bower.json)
npm start - Used to start app with BrowserSync, Nodemon, Sass auto-compiling, and auto-injection enabled.

Unfortunately, I've discovered some problems and, while this works overall, there are some ways you can break it or send gulp spiraling into an infinite loop.

Until I fix these bugs, (or someone else does :D) there's a very specific set of rules to follow when using the included commands to keep everything running smoothly:

Don't use bower install while the server is running. This is most likely going to send gulp into an infinite loop.
Check your index.html after installing any packages through bower to make sure the dependencies were injected correctly. The filtering is not very specific so there's often unwanted/unneeded css/js files that get added.
If bower injection is really more of a hassle than a help for you, default to sourcing from a CDN as usual, just don't put the CDN tags inside of the auto-injection comments or they will be overwritten.

zoeyTM/angular-starter