This project is an application skeleton for a typical AngularJS web app using the Ignite UI directives for AngularJS. 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 Angular framework and a bunch of development and testing tools for instant web development gratification.
The seed app contains samples using the following Ignite UI controls: igGrid, igDataChart, igCombo and editors.
The Ignite UI directives for AngularJS allow you to take advantage of the data binding and declarative view programming when using Ignite UI controls in AngularJS apps. In the Ignite UI directives for AngularJS repository you can always find the latest source and samples.
Please refer to the Ignite UI directives for AngularJS help for documentation and samples.
To get you started you can simply clone the igniteui-angular-seed repository and install the dependencies:
You need git to clone the igniteui-angular-seed repository. You can get git from here.
We also use a number of Node.js tools to initialize and test igniteui-angular-seed. You must have Node.js
and its package manager (npm) installed. You can get them from here.
Clone the igniteui-angular-seed repository using git:
git clone https://github.com/IgniteUI/igniteui-angular-seed.git
cd igniteui-angular-seed
If you just want to start a new project without the igniteui-angular-seed commit history then you can do:
git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/IgniteUI/igniteui-angular-seed.git <your-project-name>
The depth=1 tells git to only pull down one commit worth of historical data.
We have three kinds of dependencies in this project: tools, AngularJS framework code and Ignite UI directives for AngularJS. 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 and the Ignite UI directives via
bower, a client-side code 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 run bower so we can simply do:
npm install
Behind the scenes this will also call bower install. After that, you should find out that you have
two new folders in your project.
node_modules- contains the npm packages for the tools we needapp/bower_components- contains the Angular framework files
Note that the bower_components folder would normally be installed in the root folder but
igniteui-angular-seed changes this location through the .bowerrc file. Putting it in the app folder
makes it easier to serve the files by a web server.
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.
There are two kinds of tests in the igniteui-angular-seed application: Unit tests and end-to-end tests.
The igniteui-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 an
_test.jssuffix (e.g.chart_test.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
The igniteui-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 Angular 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 igniteui-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.
Since the Angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) 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 bower update, which in turn will find and install the latest
versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json and bower.json files
respectively.
The igniteui-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.
While Angular is client-side-only technology and it is possible to create Angular 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://.
The igniteui-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 a 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.
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.
Angular 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 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 web server(s).
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 igniteui-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.
For more information on AngularJS please check out angularjs.org.