Angular Template

This template provides a starter project that implements best practices in coding, building and testing AngularJS applications. Features include:

• A well-organized component hierarchy starting from approot. Components are implemented using directives (no dangling controllers). This provides a good architectural direction until Angular 2.0 becomes available.
• Follows AngularJS style guidelines (e.g. controller as syntax).
• Uses AngularUI Router for flexible routing and nested views.
• Uses Angular Bootstrap to remove dependencies on jQuery and Bootstrap’s JavaScript.
• Provides logging and exception handling frameworks with toaster notifications.
• Provides a Gulp based build system – code changes are reflected in the browser immediately.
• Uses Karma, Mocha and Chai for testing.

Further Reading

Visit our wiki for detailed concepts and useful recipes for extending the template.

Check out the following projects to see how this template can be used to build real applications:

• Manage My Money Client (AngularJS best practices)
• Manage My Money Server (Node.js, REST and DDD best practices)

Requirements

• Install Node
  • on OSX, install home brew and type brew install node
  • on Windows, use the installer available at nodejs.org
  • On OSX you can alleviate the need to run as sudo by following John Papa's instructions
• Open terminal
• Type npm install -g node-inspector bower gulp

Quick Start

Clone this repo and run the content locally:

$ npm install
$ gulp serve-dev

• npm install will install the required node libraries under node_modules and then call bower install which will install the required client-side libraries under bower_components.
• gulp serve-dev will serve up the Angular application in a browser window. It is designed for an efficient development process. As you make changes to the code, the browser will update to reflect the changes immediately.

When you are ready to build the application for production, run the following command:

$ gulp serve-build

This will build a production-ready package in the /build folder.

Folder Structure

The folder structure is somewhat simplified and flatter compared to John Papa's Gulp Patterns project. The description below includes reasons for some of my customizations.

Highest Level Structure

/bower_components
/build
/node_modules
/src
/test

• bower_components: Bower components downloaded by bower install (do not check in)

• build: Production build (do not check in)

• node_modules: Node.js modules downloaded by npm install (do not check in)

• src: contains all the client source files including HTML, styles (in SASS format), JavaScript and images

• test: contains client tests. This folder is intentionally kept separate from client source because I expect many different types of tests in this folder (unit, integration, acceptance). On real projects, the number of test files can easily exceed the number of source files, hence I like to keep the clutter away from the real source - just my preference!

Source Folder Structure

/src
    /components
    /core
    /framework
    /images
    /app.module.js
    /app.scss
    /index.html

The src folder contains only the source for the AngularJS client application. It treats all 3 web technologies (HTML, CSS and JavaScript) as first class citizens and arranges them into logical modules. At the highest level you will find the main html, css (well, scss) and js files:

• index.html
• app.scss
• app.module.js

Below this level you will find various folders that arrange the application's functionality into logical modules.

• framework: Container for reusable services such as logging, exception handling, routing, security, local storage etc. These services are expected to work out-of-the-box without any changes for most applications. The template provides sample implementations for the first three. (This folder is called blocks in the gulp-patterns project.)

• core: Contains functionality that is shared across the application and will probably need customization for a specific application. This includes directives, filters and services and styles common to the entire application.

• components: Contains all the components of the application. We recommend thinking of an Angular application as a tree of components, starting with the app component as the root of this tree.

• images: Images used in the application.

Tasks

Task Listing

• gulp help

  Displays all of the available gulp tasks.

Code Analysis

• gulp vet

  Performs static code analysis on all javascript files. Runs jshint and jscs.

• gulp vet --verbose

  Displays all files affected and extended information about the code analysis.

• gulp plato

  Performs code analysis using plato on all javascript files. Plato generates a report in the reports folder.

Testing

• gulp test

  Runs all unit tests using karma runner, mocha, chai and sinon with phantomjs. Depends on vet task, for code analysis.

• gulp autotest

  Runs a watch to run all unit tests.

Cleaning Up

• gulp clean

  Remove all files from the build and temp folders

• gulp clean-images

  Remove all images from the build folder

• gulp clean-code

  Remove all javascript and html from the build folder

• gulp clean-fonts

  Remove all fonts from the build folder

• gulp clean-styles

  Remove all styles from the build folder

Fonts and Images

• gulp fonts

  Copy all fonts from source to the build folder

• gulp images

  Copy all images from source to the build folder

Styles

• gulp styles

  Compile less files to CSS, add vendor prefixes, and copy to the build folder

Angular HTML Templates

• gulp templatecache

  Create an Angular module that adds all HTML templates to Angular's $templateCache. This pre-fetches all HTML templates saving XHR calls for the HTML.

• gulp templatecache --verbose

  Displays all files affected by the task.

Serving Development Code

• gulp serve-dev

  Serves the development code and launches it in a browser. The goal of building for development is to do it as fast as possible, to keep development moving efficiently. This task serves all code from the source folders and compiles less to css in a temp folder.

Building Production Code

• gulp html

  Optimize all javascript and styles, move to a build folder, and inject them into the new index.html

• gulp build

  Copies all fonts, copies images and runs gulp html to build the production code to the build folder.

Serving Production Code

• gulp serve-build

  Serve the optimized code from the build folder and launch it in a browser.

Credits

This template is heavily influenced by John Papa's AngularJS Style Guide and his Gulp Patterns project. I would like to take this opportunity to thank John for providing these excellent resources to make our jobs easier and more enjoyable.