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Christophe Rosset edited this page Jan 15, 2016 · 16 revisions

#FAQ

##installation

###Dependencies

All the dependencies are installed locally, not to mess with your global version, so the npm install can take a moment. If you feel like the node_modules folder is too fat, you can extract the modules usually installed globally (like karma, protractor, phantomjs ...). Just update the deps (and the npm tasks) in the package.json.

##gulp

Something about the gulp tasks and the gulp workflow vs npm tasks running directly some scripts (anything that doesn't need gulp ...)

###Why use gulp over other task runners ?

I've used a lot Grunt, this was an opportunity to learn gulp. I started the gulp tasks from scratch to understand all the workflow, but I only used gulp when it was necessary (for protractor or karma, for example, I use the specific cli launched with an npm task).

###flags

Some gulp tasks I developed can take flags to override default properties like :

The --env flag accepts dev, dist and test.

  • It's by default set to dev
  • If an environment variable ENV exists, this one will be taken in account
  • If you pass an --env flag, it will be reflected in process.env.ENV

Note: If you have an environment variable ENV, your gulp task will always be executed in that mode. To overload that, pass the flag --env.

###port

As explained in the README, with the flag --port, you can override the port for gulp serve.

The default port number is configured in the config section of the package.json file. You can change it without breaking anything (even e2e tests will use it and point to the port you specified - no hardcoded port number).

##Setup

###Travis CI setup

Your build is failing on Travis CI ? If you have the following error :

GitHub rate limit reached. To increase the limit use GitHub authentication.
     Run jspm endpoint config github to set this up.

I made a step by step gist to help you resolve this : Travis setup of Github token for jspm

###Travis CI setup SauceLabs

You'll find most of the infos you're looking for in this post.

If you're looking for the way I implemented SauceLabs on this project, check this commit: #7898239

Note: The e2e tests won't pass on node v12 ... I won't investigate anymore since jspm users are most likely to be at least on node v4.

##jspm

###What is jspm ?

jspm is many things :

All you'll need to do is install the cli : npm install -g jspm

You'll learn to install depencencies like this : jspm install jquery

For more infos, see the jspm getting started.

If you have other jspm related question, you might find your answers under the jspm section of the Reminder page

##karma

###Why can't I see my console.logs on the terminal output ?

console.*() statements are polluting the report in the terminal, so I removed them from karma when you launch it with npm test.

You can have them launching npm run test-unit

This is done by modifying karma's configuration on the fly, the client.captureConsole attribute - see #8171d9f for implementation.

##protractor

###Why choose protractor for e2e testing since it's angular specific ?

As I explain in the long term roadmap, my endgoal is to make an angular/es6/jspm stack, so I decided to use protractor since it works very well with angular for e2e testing.

This is the only "angular-specific" tool you'll find in that project.

But since protractor is basically a wrapper around WebDriverJs, you can also use it to test non-angular sites, simply by disabling the browser.ignoreSynchronization flag in the config.

You can manage this flag by specifying in the config part of the package.json file whether you're using angular or not (for the moment it's false by default) - example;

"config": {
  "isAngular": false
}

Note: I added utilities in case you want to test a site in both angular and non-angular.

##Continuous Integration

###Why don't e2e tests run on pull requests ?

As you can see on the .travis.yml file, some encrypted tokens are specified at the top. Some of those are the credentials for SauceLabs, the platform that runs the end to end tests from Travis (read this blog post about Travis & SauceLabs).

For security reasons, the secure tokens aren't exported as environment variables when the pull-requests comes from external forks.

I had two solutions:

Do like Angular, Ember or other frameworks: they leave the username/accesskey in clear, so that e2e tests could be run even on pull-requests - but your credentials stays out in the open (even if you can disable then at any time).

Or disable end to end tests on pull requests.

I decided to disable them, because this project is a boilerplate, not a framework. It's suppose to give you good basis to start with (keeping your API keys private is one of this good practice). Maybe if I get tons of pull-requests, I'll change that, but for the moment ...

##Miscellaneous

###Project name

In versions before v0.5.0, the project was named angular-es6-jspm, I decided to rename it to vanilla-es6-jspm and split my project to make an angular/es6/jspm boilerplate in two projects : the one in vanillaJS, the one for angular, so that it could be easier to share/contribute/evolve each versions for me as well as for potentials contributors.

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