ember-cli

What is ember-cli?

Ember CLI is the command line interface for managing and developing Ember.js applications. It provides a robust set of tools for scaffolding, building, testing, and deploying Ember.js applications.

What are ember-cli's main functionalities?

Project Creation

This command creates a new Ember.js application with the name 'my-app'. It sets up the project structure, installs dependencies, and configures the build system.

ember new my-app

Generating Blueprints

This command generates a new component called 'my-component'. Blueprints are templates for generating various parts of an Ember.js application, such as components, routes, and services.

ember generate component my-component

Running the Development Server

This command starts a local development server, allowing you to preview your application in the browser. It also watches for file changes and automatically reloads the application.

ember serve

Building the Application

This command builds the Ember.js application for production. It optimizes the assets and outputs them to the 'dist' directory, ready for deployment.

ember build --environment production

Running Tests

This command runs the application's test suite. Ember CLI supports both unit and integration tests, and it can be configured to run tests in different environments.

ember test

Other packages similar to ember-cli

create-react-app

Create React App is a command line tool for creating and managing React applications. It provides a similar set of features to Ember CLI, including project scaffolding, development server, and build tools. However, it is tailored specifically for React applications.

vue-cli

Vue CLI is the standard tooling for Vue.js development. It offers a similar feature set to Ember CLI, including project creation, development server, and build tools. Vue CLI also provides a plugin system for extending its functionality.

angular-cli

Angular CLI is the command line interface for Angular applications. It provides tools for generating components, services, and other parts of an Angular application, as well as running a development server and building the application for production. It is similar to Ember CLI but tailored for Angular.

README

ember-cli

an ember commandline utility.

Warning

Although potentially exciting, this is still really a WIP, use at your own risk.

Why?

The ember-app-kit project has proved to be quite useful, we have learned lots, and it allowed us to iterate quickly while building real ambitious applications.

While it's initial incarnation is useful, it has several meta problems:

1. It is not "simple" and appears daunting
2. Because of inline configuration, the api surface area is massive
3. #2 does not allow users to express the "what" just the "how", this prevents EAK from doing more of the heavy lifting itself
4. [#2 #3] makes it quite tedious to upgrade

Rationale for #3

If we want to upgrade or swap in a faster build pipeline it would be a major pain currently. But with #3, in theory it should be minimal pain.

Guidelines

• convention over configuration. (look to rails)
  • we should provide internal configuration/implementation to satisfy the 'what' with the how.
• simple > easy
• the current contents of tasks/* should reside in the ember executables library
• the pipeline-related Broccoli configuration should also reside in the above mentioned library.

Usage

Getting Started

npm install -g ember-cli

ember new my-cool-app
cd my-cool-app
ember server

Current Commands

ember build <env-name>
ember server
ember init [app-name] [--dry-run] [--skip-npm-install]
ember new  [app-name]

Developing

You may want to use npm link to make your local source directory a globally installed package. See npm-developers.

Running tests

Once:

npm test

On every file change:

npm run-script autotest

LESS, Sass, or Stylus

You can use LESS, Sass (scss only), or Stylus by installing the corresponding Broccoli package (broccoli-sass, broccoli-less-single or broccoli-stylus-single).

For example, to enable SCSS compilation:

npm install --save-dev broccoli-sass

Contributing

Submit a pull request (code + tests) and make sure to add the change to CHANGELOG.md.

Building will now compile app/styles/app.scss into app.css in your output.

Ideas

• excutable (this project)

  ember
  ember init  <app-name>
  ember build <env-name> [default: development] [optional: target path]
  ember server
    --autotest   [default: false]
    --port       [default: 8000]
    --subscribe  [default:release, optional: (beta|canary)]
                 # on "start" of an app, it will prompt the user if the channel they
                 # subscribe to has an update.
                 # if an update occured. they are asked [yes, no] to try the update (using bower)
                 #   (what about other libs? ember-data or components or..)
    --env        [default: development] # allow previewing the various build envs.
    --app        [default: .]
  
  ember generate [...]
  ember generate scaffold [...] # for resources
  
  ember addon # reserved for future use.
  

• folder structure: (very similar to what we currently have)

  app/*            # like EAK today
  tasks/           # custom user tasks
  vendor/          # mostly for bower, some non-bower stuff will reside.
  tests/           # tests test config and test helpers.
  tmp/*            # created on demand, but scratch pad for EAK.
  Brocfile.js      # should contain a mechanism for default ember tasks to be loaded
                   # should be the place for users to define custom broccoli related things.
  package.json
  bower.json
  .gitignore
  .travis
  .jshintrc
  

• configuration

  server.js                    # for adding additional connect middleware (like a proxy to the backend)
  Brocfile                     # default tasks will exist in "ember"
  tasks/                       # custom user tasks
  

• detect .js, .coffee, .styl, .scss, .sass and use the appropriate filter, or throw with useful error.

  new Error('Tried compiling: `app.coffee` but CoffesScript is missing, to install please: `npm install coffee-script --save-dev`')
  

• tasks (consider extracting them into broccoli-ember)