angular-seed — the seed for AngularJS apps

This project started from the Angular seed app: AngularJS . You can use it to quickly bootstrap your angular webapp projects and dev environment for these projects.

For this specific Code School project we will not be testing, so we have removed all things testing related for simplicity.

Getting Started

To get you started you can simply clone the angular-ansible repo and install the dependencies:

Prerequisites

You need git to clone the angular-ansible repository. You can get it from http://. alyssa here

We also use a number of node.js tools to initialize and include packages for angular-ansible. You must have node.js and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from http://nodejs.org/.

Clone angular-seed

If you would like to start from the angular-seed project you can clone it using git:

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

If you would like to start with the fully completed angular-ansible repository you can clone like so using git:

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

alyssa here

Install Dependencies

We have two kinds of dependencies in this project: tools and angular framework code. The tools help us manage and test the application.

We get the tools we depend upon via npm, the node package manager.
We get the angular code via bower, a client-side code package manager.

We have preconfigured npm to automatically run bower so we can simply do:

npm install

Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. You should find that you have two new folders in your project.

node_modules - contains the npm packages for the tools we need
app/bower_components - contains the angular framework files

Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but angular-seed changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder makes it easier to serve the files by a webserver. -angular-seed comment

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 pull up your application at http://localhost:8000/app/index.html. You can change this in package.json.

Directory Layout

app/                --> all of the files to be used in production **alyssa here**
  css/              --> css files
    app.css         --> default stylesheet
  img/              --> image files
  index.html        --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
  js/               --> javascript files
    app.js          --> application
    controllers.js  --> application controllers
    directives.js   --> application directives
    filters.js      --> custom angular filters
    services.js     --> custom angular services
  partials/             --> angular view partials (partial html templates)
    partial1.html
    partial2.html

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][jasmine], which we run with the [Karma Test Runner][karma]. We provide a Karma configuration file to run them.

the configuration is found at test/karma.conf.js
the unit tests are found in test/unit/.

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 sit and watch the source and test files for changes and then re-run the tests whenever any of them change. 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

End to end testing

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

the configuration is found at test/protractor-conf.js
the end-to-end tests are found in test/e2e/

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.

npm start

Updating Angular

Previously the Angular team recommended that you merge in changes to angular-seed into your own fork of the project. Now that the angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools instead to update the dependencies.

You can update the tool dependencies by running:

npm update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json file.

You can update the Angular dependencies by running:

bower update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the bower.json file.

Loading Angular 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 Angular 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 Angular that you are using.

Serving the Application Files

While angular is client-side-only technology and it's possible to create angular webapps that don't require a backend server at all, we recommend serving the project files using a local webserver 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 file:// scheme instead of http://.

Running the App during Development

The angular-seed project comes preconfigured with a local development webserver. It is a node.js tool called http-server. You can start this webserver 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 a folder by running:

http-server

Alternatively, you can choose to configure your own webserver, 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 is your app and the overall infrastructure of your system, but the general rule is that all you need in production are all the files under the app/ directory. Everything else should be omitted.

Angular apps are really just a bunch of static html, css and js files that just need to be hosted somewhere they can be accessed by browsers.

If your Angular 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 webserver(s).

Contact

For more information on AngularJS and other kick-butt languages check out Code School!

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