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angular-seed — the seed for AngularJS apps

This project is an application skeleton for a typical AngularJS web app. You can use it to quickly bootstrap your angular webapp projects and dev environment for these projects.

The seed contains a sample AngularJS application and is preconfigured to install the AngularJS framework and a bunch of development and testing tools for instant web development gratification.

The seed app doesn't do much, just shows how to wire two controllers and views together.

Getting Started

To get you started you can simply clone the angular-seed repository and install the dependencies:

Prerequisites

You need git to clone the angular-seed repository. You can get git from here.

We also use a number of Node.js tools to initialize and test angular-seed. You must have Node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from here.

Clone angular-seed

Clone the angular-seed repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/angular/angular-seed.git
cd angular-seed

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

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/angular/angular-seed.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 and the AngularJS code via npm, the Node package manager.
• In order to run the end-to-end tests, you will also need to have the Java Development Kit (JDK) installed on your machine. Check out the section on end-to-end testing for more info.

We have preconfigured npm to automatically copy the downloaded AngularJS files to app/lib so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call npm run copy-libs, which copies the AngularJS files and other front end dependencies. After that, you should find out that you have two new directories in your project.

• node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
• app/lib - contains the AngularJS framework files and other front end dependencies

Note copying the AngularJS files from node_modules to app/lib makes it easier to serve the files by a web server.

Run the Application

We have preconfigured the project with a simple development web server. The simplest way to start this server is:

npm start

Now browse to the app at localhost:8000/index.html.

Directory Layout

app/                  --> all of the source files for the application
  app.css               --> default stylesheet
  core/                 --> all app specific modules
    version/              --> version related components
      version.js                 --> version module declaration and basic "version" value service
      version_test.js            --> "version" value service tests
      version-directive.js       --> custom directive that returns the current app version
      version-directive_test.js  --> version directive tests
      interpolate-filter.js      --> custom interpolation filter
      interpolate-filter_test.js --> interpolate filter tests
  view1/                --> the view1 view template and logic
    view1.html            --> the partial template
    view1.js              --> the controller logic
    view1_test.js         --> tests of the controller
  view2/                --> the view2 view template and logic
    view2.html            --> the partial template
    view2.js              --> the controller logic
    view2_test.js         --> tests of the controller
  app.js                --> main application module
  index.html            --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
  index-async.html      --> just like index.html, but loads js files asynchronously
e2e-tests/            --> end-to-end tests
  protractor-conf.js    --> Protractor config file
  scenarios.js          --> end-to-end scenarios to be run by Protractor
karma.conf.js         --> config file for running unit tests with Karma
package.json          --> Node.js specific metadata, including development tools dependencies
package-lock.json     --> Npm specific metadata, including versions of installed development tools dependencies

Testing

There are two kinds of tests in the angular-seed application: Unit tests and end-to-end tests.

Running Unit Tests

The angular-seed app comes preconfigured with unit tests. These are written in Jasmine, which we run with the Karma test runner. We provide a Karma configuration file to run them.

• The configuration is found at karma.conf.js.
• The unit tests are found next to the code they are testing and have a .spec.js suffix (e.g. view1.spec.js).

The easiest way to run the unit tests is to use the supplied npm script:

npm test

This script will start the Karma test runner to execute the unit tests. Moreover, Karma will start watching the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them changes. This is the recommended strategy; if your unit tests are being run every time you save a file then you receive instant feedback on any changes that break the expected code functionality.

You can also ask Karma to do a single run of the tests and then exit. This is useful if you want to check that a particular version of the code is operating as expected. The project contains a predefined script to do this:

npm run test-single-run

Running End-to-End Tests

The angular-seed app comes with end-to-end tests, again written in Jasmine. These tests are run with the Protractor End-to-End test runner. It uses native events and has special features for AngularJS applications.

• The configuration is found at e2e-tests/protractor-conf.js.
• The end-to-end tests are found in e2e-tests/scenarios.js.

Protractor simulates interaction with our web app and verifies that the application responds correctly. Therefore, our web server needs to be serving up the application, so that Protractor can interact with it.

Before starting Protractor, open a separate terminal window and run:

npm start

In addition, since Protractor is built upon WebDriver, we need to ensure that it is installed and up-to-date. The angular-seed project is configured to do this automatically before running the end-to-end tests, so you don't need to worry about it. If you want to manually update the WebDriver, you can run:

npm run update-webdriver

Once you have ensured that the development web server hosting our application is up and running, you can run the end-to-end tests using the supplied npm script:

npm run protractor

This script will execute the end-to-end tests against the application being hosted on the development server.

Note: Under the hood, Protractor uses the Selenium Standalone Server, which in turn requires the Java Development Kit (JDK) to be installed on your local machine. Check this by running java -version from the command line.

If JDK is not already installed, you can download it here.

Updating AngularJS and other dependencies

Since the AngularJS framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (e.g. npm) you can use these tools to easily update the dependencies. Simply run the preconfigured script:

npm run update-deps

This will call npm update and npm run copy-libs, which in turn will find and install the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json file.

If you want to update a dependency to a version newer than what the specificed range would permit, you can change the version range in package.json and then run npm run update-deps as usual.

Loading AngularJS Asynchronously

The angular-seed project supports loading the framework and application scripts asynchronously. The special index-async.html is designed to support this style of loading. For it to work you must inject a piece of AngularJS JavaScript into the HTML page. The project has a predefined script to help do this:

npm run update-index-async

This will copy the contents of the angular-loader.js library file into the index-async.html page. You can run this every time you update the version of AngularJS that you are using.

Serving the Application Files

While AngularJS is client-side-only technology and it is possible to create AngularJS web apps that do not 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 the file:// scheme instead of http://.

Running the App during Development

The angular-seed project comes preconfigured with a local development web server. It is a Node.js tool called http-server. You can start this web server with npm start, but you may choose to install the tool globally:

sudo npm install -g http-server

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

http-server -a localhost -p 8000

Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own web server, such as Apache or Nginx. Just configure your server to serve the files under the app/ directory.

Running the App in Production

This really depends on how complex your app is and the overall infrastructure of your system, but the general rule is that all you need in production are the files under the app/ directory. Everything else should be omitted.

AngularJS apps are really just a bunch of static HTML, CSS and JavaScript files that need to be hosted somewhere they can be accessed by browsers.

If your AngularJS app is talking to the backend server via XHR or other means, you need to figure out what is the best way to host the static files to comply with the same origin policy if applicable. Usually this is done by hosting the files by the backend server or through reverse-proxying the backend server(s) and web server(s).

Continuous Integration

Travis CI

Travis CI is a continuous integration service, which can monitor GitHub for new commits to your repository and execute scripts such as building the app or running tests. The angular-seed project contains a Travis configuration file, .travis.yml, which will cause Travis to run your tests when you push to GitHub.

You will need to enable the integration between Travis and GitHub. See the Travis website for instructions on how to do this.

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out angularjs.org.