Angular4 Webpack Starter

An Angular starter kit featuring Angular 4, Ahead of Time Compile, Router, Forms, Http, Services, Tests, E2E), Karma, Protractor, Jasmine, Istanbul, TypeScript, @types, TsLint, Codelyzer, Hot Module Replacement, and Webpack 2 by AngularClass.

If you're looking for Angular 1.x please use NG6-starter If you're looking to learn about Webpack and ES6 Build Tools check out ES6-build-tools If you're looking to learn TypeScript see TypeStrong/learn-typescript If you're looking for something easier to get started with then see the angular-seed that I also maintain AngularClass/angular-seed

This seed repo serves as an Angular starter for anyone looking to get up and running with Angular and TypeScript fast. Using a Webpack 3 for building our files and assisting with boilerplate. We're also using Protractor for our end-to-end story and Karma for our unit tests.

• Best practices in file and application organization for Angular.
• Ready to go build system using Webpack for working with TypeScript.
• Angular examples that are ready to go when experimenting with Angular.
• A great Angular seed repo for anyone who wants to start their project.
• Ahead of Time (AoT) compile for rapid page loads of your production builds.
• Tree shaking to automatically remove unused code from your production bundle.
• Webpack DLLs dramatically speed your development builds.
• Testing Angular code with Jasmine and Karma.
• Coverage with Istanbul and Karma
• End-to-end Angular code using Protractor.
• Type manager with @types
• Hot Module Replacement with Webpack and @angularclass/hmr and @angularclass/hmr-loader
• Angular 4 support via changing package.json and any future Angular versions

Quick start

Make sure you have Node version >= 6.0 and NPM >= 3

Clone/Download the repo then edit app.component.ts inside /src/app/app.component.ts

# clone our repo
# --depth 1 removes all but one .git commit history
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/AngularClass/angular-starter.git

# change directory to our repo
cd angular-starter

# WINDOWS only. In terminal as administrator
npm install -g node-pre-gyp

# install the repo with npm
npm install

# start the server
npm start

# use Hot Module Replacement
npm run server:dev:hmr

# if you're in China use cnpm
# https://github.com/cnpm/cnpm

go to http://0.0.0.0:3000 or http://localhost:3000 in your browser

Table of Contents

• File Structure
• Getting Started
  • Dependencies
  • Installing
  • Running the app
• Configuration
• AoT Don'ts
• External Stylesheets
• Contributing
• TypeScript
• @Types
• Frequently asked questions
• Support, Questions, or Feedback
• Deployment
• License

File Structure

We use the component approach in our starter. This is the new standard for developing Angular apps and a great way to ensure maintainable code by encapsulation of our behavior logic. A component is basically a self contained app usually in a single file or a folder with each concern as a file: style, template, specs, e2e, and component class. Here's how it looks:

angular-starter/
 ├──config/                        * our configuration
 |   ├──helpers.js                 * helper functions for our configuration files
 |   ├──spec-bundle.js             * ignore this magic that sets up our Angular testing environment
 |   ├──karma.conf.js              * karma config for our unit tests
 |   ├──protractor.conf.js         * protractor config for our end-to-end tests
 │   ├──webpack.dev.js             * our development webpack config
 │   ├──webpack.prod.js            * our production webpack config
 │   └──webpack.test.js            * our testing webpack config
 │
 ├──src/                           * our source files that will be compiled to javascript
 |   ├──main.browser.ts            * our entry file for our browser environment
 │   │
 |   ├──index.html                 * Index.html: where we generate our index page
 │   │
 |   ├──polyfills.ts               * our polyfills file
 │   │
 │   ├──app/                       * WebApp: folder
 │   │   ├──app.component.spec.ts  * a simple test of components in app.component.ts
 │   │   ├──app.e2e.ts             * a simple end-to-end test for /
 │   │   └──app.component.ts       * a simple version of our App component components
 │   │
 │   └──assets/                    * static assets are served here
 │       ├──icon/                  * our list of icons from www.favicon-generator.org
 │       ├──service-worker.js      * ignore this. Web App service worker that's not complete yet
 │       ├──robots.txt             * for search engines to crawl your website
 │       └──humans.txt             * for humans to know who the developers are
 │
 │
 ├──tslint.json                    * typescript lint config
 ├──typedoc.json                   * typescript documentation generator
 ├──tsconfig.json                  * typescript config used outside webpack
 ├──tsconfig.webpack.json          * config that webpack uses for typescript
 ├──package.json                   * what npm uses to manage its dependencies
 └──webpack.config.js              * webpack main configuration file

Getting Started

Dependencies

What you need to run this app:

• node and npm (brew install node)
• Ensure you're running the latest versions Node v6.x.x+ (or v7.x.x) and NPM 3.x.x+

If you have nvm installed, which is highly recommended (brew install nvm) you can do a nvm install --lts && nvm use in $ to run with the latest Node LTS. You can also have this zsh done for you automatically

Once you have those, you should install these globals with npm install --global:

• webpack (npm install --global webpack)
• webpack-dev-server (npm install --global webpack-dev-server)
• karma (npm install --global karma-cli)
• protractor (npm install --global protractor)
• typescript (npm install --global typescript)

Installing

• fork this repo
• clone your fork
• npm install webpack-dev-server rimraf webpack -g to install required global dependencies
• npm install to install all dependencies or yarn
• npm run server to start the dev server in another tab

Running the app

After you have installed all dependencies you can now run the app. Run npm run server to start a local server using webpack-dev-server which will watch, build (in-memory), and reload for you. The port will be displayed to you as http://0.0.0.0:3000 (or if you prefer IPv6, if you're using express server, then it's http://[::1]:3000/).

server

# development
npm run server
# production
npm run build:prod
npm run server:prod

Other commands

build files

# development
npm run build:dev
# production (jit)
npm run build:prod
# AoT
npm run build:aot

hot module replacement

npm run server:dev:hmr

watch and build files

npm run watch

run unit tests

npm run test

watch and run our tests

npm run watch:test

run end-to-end tests

# update Webdriver (optional, done automatically by postinstall script)
npm run webdriver:update
# this will start a test server and launch Protractor
npm run e2e

continuous integration (run unit tests and e2e tests together)

# this will test both your JIT and AoT builds
npm run ci

run Protractor's elementExplorer (for end-to-end)

npm run e2e:live

build Docker

npm run build:docker

Configuration

Configuration files live in config/ we are currently using webpack, karma, and protractor for different stages of your application

AoT Don'ts

The following are some things that will make AoT compile fail.

• Don’t use require statements for your templates or styles, use styleUrls and templateUrls, the angular2-template-loader plugin will change it to require at build time.
• Don’t use default exports.
• Don’t use form.controls.controlName, use form.get(‘controlName’)
• Don’t use control.errors?.someError, use control.hasError(‘someError’)
• Don’t use functions in your providers, routes or declarations, export a function and then reference that function name
• @Inputs, @Outputs, View or Content Child(ren), Hostbindings, and any field you use from the template or annotate for Angular should be public

External Stylesheets

Any stylesheets (Sass or CSS) placed in the src/styles directory and imported into your project will automatically be compiled into an external .css and embedded in your production builds.

For example to use Bootstrap as an external stylesheet:

1. Create a styles.scss file (name doesn't matter) in the src/styles directory.
2. npm install the version of Boostrap you want.
3. In styles.scss add @import 'bootstrap/scss/bootstrap.scss';
4. In src/app/app.module.ts add underneath the other import statements: import '../styles/styles.scss';

Contributing

You can include more examples as components but they must introduce a new concept such as Home component (separate folders), and Todo (services). I'll accept pretty much everything so feel free to open a Pull-Request

TypeScript

To take full advantage of TypeScript with autocomplete you would have to install it globally and use an editor with the correct TypeScript plugins.

Use latest TypeScript compiler

TypeScript 2.1.x includes everything you need. Make sure to upgrade, even if you installed TypeScript previously.

npm install --global typescript

Use a TypeScript-aware editor

We have good experience using these editors:

• Visual Studio Code
• Webstorm 10
• Atom with TypeScript plugin
• Sublime Text with Typescript-Sublime-Plugin

Visual Studio Code + Debugger for Chrome

Install Debugger for Chrome and see docs for instructions to launch Chrome

The included .vscode automatically connects to the webpack development server on port 3000.

Types

When you include a module that doesn't include Type Definitions inside of the module you can include external Type Definitions with @types

i.e, to have youtube api support, run this command in terminal:

npm i @types/youtube @types/gapi @types/gapi.youtube

In some cases where your code editor doesn't support Typescript 2 yet or these types weren't listed in tsconfig.json, add these to "src/custom-typings.d.ts" to make peace with the compile check:

import '@types/gapi.youtube';
import '@types/gapi';
import '@types/youtube';

Custom Type Definitions

When including 3rd party modules you also need to include the type definition for the module if they don't provide one within the module. You can try to install it with @types

npm install @types/node
npm install @types/lodash

If you can't find the type definition in the registry we can make an ambient definition in this file for now. For example

declare module "my-module" {
  export function doesSomething(value: string): string;
}

If you're prototyping and you will fix the types later you can also declare it as type any

declare var assert: any;
declare var _: any;
declare var $: any;

If you're importing a module that uses Node.js modules which are CommonJS you need to import as

import * as _ from 'lodash';

Frequently asked questions

• What's the current browser support for Angular?
  • Please view the updated list of browser support for Angular 2
• Why is my service, aka provider, is not injecting parameter correctly?
  • Please use @Injectable() for your service for typescript to correctly attach the metadata (this is a TypeScript problem)
• Where do I write my tests?
  • You can write your tests next to your component files. See /src/app/home/home.component.spec.ts
• How do I start the app when I get EACCES and EADDRINUSE errors?
  • The EADDRINUSE error means the port 3000 is currently being used and EACCES is lack of permission for webpack to build files to ./dist/
• How to use sass for css?
• • loaders: ['raw-loader','sass-loader'] and @Component({ styleUrls: ['./filename.scss'] }) see Wiki page How to include SCSS in components, or issue #136 for more information.
• How do I test a Service?
  • See issue #130
• How do I add vscode-chrome-debug support?
  • The VS Code chrome debug extension support can be done via launch.json see issue #144
• How do I make the repo work in a virtual machine?
  • You need to use 0.0.0.0 so revert these changes #205
• What are the naming conventions for Angular?
  • please see issue #185 and PR 196
• How do I include bootstrap or jQuery?
  • please see issue #215 and #214
• How do I async load a component?
  • see wiki How-do-I-async-load-a-component-with-AsyncRoute
• Error: Cannot find module 'tapable'
  • Remove node_modules/ and run npm cache clean then npm install
• How do I turn on Hot Module Replacement
  • Run npm run server:dev:hmr
• RangeError: Maximum call stack size exceeded
  • This is a problem with minifying Angular and it's recent JIT templates. If you set mangle to false then you should be good.
• Why is the size of my app larger in development?
  • We are using inline source-maps and hot module replacement which will increase the bundle size.
• If you're in China
  • check out https://github.com/cnpm/cnpm
• node-pre-gyp ERR in npm install (Windows)
  • install Python x86 version between 2.5 and 3.0 on windows see issue #626
• Error:Error: Parse tsconfig error [{"messageText":"Unknown compiler option 'lib'.","category":1,"code":5023},{"messageText":"Unknown compiler option 'strictNullChecks'.","category":1,"code":5023},{"messageText":"Unknown compiler option 'baseUrl'.","category":1,"code":5023},{"messageText":"Unknown compiler option 'paths'.","category":1,"code":5023},{"messageText":"Unknown compiler option 'types'.","category":1,"code":5023}]
  • remove node_modules/typescript and run npm install typescript@beta. This repo now uses ts 2.0
• "There are multiple modules with names that only differ in casing"
  • change c:\[path to angular-starter] to C:\[path to angular-starter] see 926#issuecomment-245223547

Support, Questions, or Feedback

Contact us anytime for anything about this repo or Angular

• Chat: AngularClass.slack
• Twitter: @AngularClass
• Gitter: AngularClass/angular2-webpack-starter

Deployment

Docker

To run project you only need host machine with operating system with installed git (to clone this repo) and docker and thats all - any other software is not needed (other software like node.js etc. will be automatically downloaded and installed inside docker container during build step based on dockerfile).

Install docker

MacOS:

brew cask install docker

And run docker by Mac bottom menu> launchpad > docker (on first run docker will ask you about password)

Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-key adv --keyserver hkp://p80.pool.sks-keyservers.net:80 --recv-keys 58118E89F3A912897C070ADBF76221572C52609D
sudo apt-add-repository 'deb https://apt.dockerproject.org/repo ubuntu-xenial main'
sudo apt-get update
apt-cache policy docker-engine
sudo apt-get install -y docker-engine
sudo systemctl status docker  # test:  shoud be ‘active’

And add your user to docker group (to avoid sudo before using docker command in future):

sudo usermod -aG docker $(whoami)

and logout and login again.

Build image

Because node.js is big memory consumer you need 1-2GB RAM or virtual memory to build docker image (it was successfully tested on machine with 512MB RAM + 2GB virtual memory - building process take 7min)

Go to main project folder. To build big (~280MB) image which has cached data and is able to FAST rebuild
(this is good for testing or staging environment) type:

docker build -t angular-starter .

To build SMALL (~20MB) image without cache (so each rebuild will take the same amount of time as first build) (this is good for production environment) type:

docker build --squash="true" -t angular-starter .

The angular-starter name used in above commands is only example image name. To remove intermediate images created by docker on build process, type:

docker rmi -f $(docker images -f "dangling=true" -q)

Run image

To run created docker image on localhost:8080 type (parameter -p 8080:80 is host:container port mapping)

docker run --name angular-starter -p 8080:80 angular-starter &

And that's all, you can open browser and go to localhost:8080.

Run image on sub-domain

If you want to run image as virtual-host on sub-domain you must setup proxy . You should install proxy and set sub-domain in this way:

docker pull jwilder/nginx-proxy:alpine
docker run -d -p 80:80 --name nginx-proxy -v /var/run/docker.sock:/tmp/docker.sock:ro jwilder/nginx-proxy:alpine

And in your /etc/hosts file (linux) add line: 127.0.0.1 angular-starter.your-domain.com or in yor hosting add folowing DNS record (wildchar * is handy because when you add new sub-domain in future, you don't need to touch/add any DNS record)

Type: CNAME 
Hostname: *.your-domain.com
Direct to: your-domain.com
TTL(sec): 43200 

And now you are ready to run image on subdomain by:

docker run -e VIRTUAL_HOST=angular-starter.your-domain.com --name angular-starter angular-starter &

Login into docker container

docker exec -t -i angular-starter /bin/bash

Netlify

You can quickly create a free site to get started using this starter kit in production on Netlify:

enjoy — AngularClass a OneSpeed company

OneSpeed

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License

MIT