swos- / improved-angular-seed

Improved angular seed project based on John Papa's styleguide

improved-angular-seed — the improved seed for AngularJS apps

This project is an application skeleton for a typical AngularJS web app. This seed is inspired by the original AngularJS seed project [https://github.com/angular/angular-seed] The improvements (in progress) include recommendations from John Papa's styleguide [https://github.com/johnpapa/angular-styleguide] and borrows ideas from [https://github.com/JshReynolds/angular-seed-styleguided]

Getting Started

To get you started you can simply clone the improved-angular-seed repository and install the dependencies:

Prerequisites

You need git to clone the improved-angular-seed repository. You can get git from http://git-scm.com/.

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

Clone improved-angular-seed

Clone the improved-angular-seed repository using git:

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

If you just want to start a new project without the improved-angular-seed commit history then you can do:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/swos-/improved-angular-seed.git <your-project-name>

The depth=1 tells git to only pull down one commit worth of historical data.

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.

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 browse to the app at http://localhost:8000/index.html.

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 improved-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 -a localhost -p 8000

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.

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out http://angularjs.org/

To Do

• Wire up layout/* components