generator-angular-flow

GENERATOR-ANGULAR-FLOW

Avoid boilerplate and improve productivity and consistency.

Features

• All scripts in public/scrips, public/components, public/modals and public/states and styles in public/styles will be automatically included in minifiers, index.html and tests. Specify configuration once and share it between all the things. Need more control? Check out resources.json.
• Controllers, views and styling are grouped on a per component and state basis to facilitate high cohesion.
• Use components as syntactic sugar to use directives as web components with a convention over configuration approach
• Start a server with live reload, easily monitoring your progress with grunt server

Roadmap:

• generate docs
• generate tests

Maintainer: Piotr Błaszczak inspired by angular-xl.

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Quick start

Install Node.js with npm FIRST!!!

then run:

npm install -g generator-angular-flow

Make a new directory, and cd into it:

mkdir my-new-project
cd my-new-project

Run yo angular-flow, with your application name:

yo angular-flow app-name

Run grunt server to start the local server.

OR

Run grunt if you use your own web serwer (apache, nginx etc.)

Developing with the generator

Available Grunt tasks

grunt (default)     to watch files for compass and live reload.
grunt server        to run a test server with live reload.
grunt server-dist   to run a test server of builded version of your app.
grunt link          links newly added files (css, js) to index.html

Generators

Available generators:

• angular-flow (aka angular-flow:app)
• angular-flow:controller
• angular-flow:directive
• angular-flow:component
• angular-flow:modal
• angular-flow:filter
• angular-flow:state
• angular-flow:service

Note: Generators are to be run from the root directory of your app.

Module

public/config/module.js contains the applications main module definition. All dependancies for your application needs to be specified here.

App

Sets up a new AngularJS app, generating all the boilerplate you need to get started. The app generator also installs Twitter Bootstrap and additional AngularJS modules.

Example:

yo angular-flow

State

States are located under public/states. A state basically is a controller, with a view and state specific styling. Routes are specified using the powerful Angular-UI Route API in the config section in the controller.

Example:

yo angular-flow:state user

Produces public/states/user/user-state.js, public/states/user/user-state.html and public/states/user/_user-state.scss

Routing

Routes are configured in public/config/routes.js. Each individual controller registers its own route.

Controller

Generates a controller in public/scripts/controllers.

Example:

yo angular-flow:controller user

Directive

Generates a directive in public/scripts/directives.

Example:

yo angular-flow:directive myDirective

Produces public/scripts/directives/my-directive.js:

angular.module('myMod').directive('myDirective', function () {
  return {
    template: '<div></div>',
    restrict: 'E',
    link: function postLink(scope, element, attrs) {
      element.text('this is the myDirective directive');
    }
  };
});

Component

A component is basically a element directive that by convention use a view located in public/components/<component-name>/<component-name>.html. This helps keep complexity low, and makes it easy to separate parts of your application into smaller and more maintainable parts.

Example:

yo angular-flow:component awesomeUnicorn

Produces these files: public/components/navbar.js:

angular.module('yourModule')
    .directive('navbarComp', function () {
            return {
                restrict: 'E',
                templateUrl: '/components/navbar/navbar.html',
                controller: 'navbarComp'
            };
        })

        .controller('navbarComp', function ($scope) {

        });

public/components/navbar/_navbar.scss (and adds an import statement to it in public/styles/_components.scss) public/components/navbar/navbar.html

<div class="navbar-comp">
    <p>This is the navbar component.</p>
</div>

Witch in turn lets you specify custom HTML tags like this to invoke a completely self contained component:

<navbar-comp></navbar-comp>

The view has specified a component name as a class, helping you avoid CSS collisions. Specify your styles specific for this component in SCSS under a .navbar-comp class wrapper, and only this component is targeted. This is an OK approach until shadow DOMs and web components become widely supported.

Filter

Generates a filter in public/scripts/filters.

Example:

yo angular-flow:filter myFilter

Produces public/scripts/filters/my-filter.js:

angular.module('myMod').filter('myFilter', function () {
  return function (input) {
    return 'myFilter filter:' + input;
  };
});

Service

Generates an AngularJS service.

Example:

yo angular-flow:service myService

Produces public/scripts/services/my-service.js:

angular.module('myMod').service('myService', function () {
  // ...
});

Bower Components

The following packages are always installed by the app generator:

• angular
• log
• angular-animate
• angular-ui-router
• angular-promise-tracker
• angular-loading-bar
• angular-ui-bootstrap

The following additional modules are optional:

• angular-cookies
• angular-loader
• angular-touch
• angular-resource
• angular-sanitize
• ngStorage

All of these can be updated with bower update as new versions of AngularJS are released. When you install new dependancies you have to add a reference to the script files in resources.json under external. The build task will inject this into index.html during runtime, and when you build the project it will by convention use the minified version of the source file, that should be located in the same folder, with the exact same filename with a .min suffix. This will be concatenated without minification.

Configuration

Yeoman generated projects can be further tweaked according to your needs by modifying project files appropriately.

Output

You can change the app directory by adding a appPath property to bower.json. For instance, if you wanted to easily integrate with Express.js, you could add the following:

{
  "name": "yo-test",
  "version": "0.0.0",
  ...
  "appPath": "public"
}

This will cause Yeoman-generated client-side files to be placed in public.

Resources.json

All configuration about what files and in what order the files are supposed to be loaded is specified in resources.json. This configuration is shared between both jasmine, minifiers and index.html.

Resource.json contains two sections. One for JS and one for SCSS.

"config/routes.js",
"scripts/**/*.js"

Files will be matched only once, so in the aforementioned example the routes config will be loaded before everything else is included.

Add a reference in resource to the unminified version of the library you want to use, as it will automatically use the library suffixed with .min during build time.

License

BSD license