ng-annotate

ng-annotate

ng-annotate adds and removes AngularJS dependency injection annotations.

Write your code without annotations and mark-up functions to be annotated with the "ngInject" directive prologue, just like you would "use strict". This must be at the beginning of your function.

$ cat source.js
angular.module("MyMod").controller("MyCtrl", function($scope, $timeout) {
    "ngInject";
    ...
});

Then run ng-annotate as a build-step to produce this intermediary, annotated, result (later sent to the minifier of choice):

$ ng-annotate -a source.js
angular.module("MyMod").controller("MyCtrl", ["$scope", "$timeout", function($scope, $timeout) {
    "ngInject";
    ...
}]);

Your minifier will most likely retain the "ngInject;" prologues so use sed or a regexp in your build toolchain to get rid of those.

You can also use ng-annotate to rebuild or remove existing annotations. Rebuilding is useful if you like to check-in the annotated version of your source code. When refactoring, just change parameter names once and let ng-annotate rebuild the annotations. Removing is useful if you want to de-annotate an existing codebase that came with checked-in annotations

Installation and usage

npm install -g ng-annotate

Then run it as ng-annotate OPTIONS <file>. The errors (if any) will go to stderr, the transpiled output to stdout.

The simplest usage is ng-annotate -a infile.js > outfile.js. See OPTIONS.md for command-line documentation.

ng-annotate can be used as a library, see OPTIONS.md for its API.

Implicit matching of common code forms

ng-annotate uses static analysis to detect common AngularJS code patterns. When this works it means that you do not need to mark-up functions with "ngInject". For a lot of code bases this works very well (use ng-strict-di to simplify debugging when it doesn't) but for others it is less reliable and you may prefer to use "ngInject" instead. For more information about implicit matching see IMPLICIT.md.

Explicit annotations with ngInject

The recommended function foo($scope) { "ngInject"; ... } can be exchanged for /*@ngInject*/ function foo($scope) { ... } or ngInject(function foo($scope) { ... }). If you use the latter form then then add function ngInject(v) { return v } somewhere in your codebase or process away the ngInject function call in your build step.

Suppressing false positives with ngNoInject

The /*@ngInject*/, ngInject(..) and "ngInject" siblings have three cousins that are used for the opposite purpose, suppressing an annotation that ng-annotate added incorrectly (a "false positive"). They are called /*@ngNoInject*/, ngNoInject(..) and "ngNoInject" and do exactly what you think they do.

ES6 and TypeScript support

ng-annotate supports ES5 as input so run it with the output from Babel, Traceur, TypeScript (tsc) and the likes. Use "ngInject"; on functions you want annotated. Your transpiler should preserve directive prologues, if not please file a bug on it.

Highly recommended: enable ng-strict-di

<div ng-app="myApp" ng-strict-di>

Do that in your ng-annotate processed (but not minified) builds and AngularJS will let you know if there are any missing dependency injection annotations. ng-strict-di is available in AngularJS 1.3 or later.

Tools support

• Grunt: grunt-ng-annotate by Michał Gołębiowski
• Browserify: browserify-ngannotate by Owen Smith
• Brunch: ng-annotate-uglify-js-brunch by Kagami Hiiragi
• Gulp: gulp-ng-annotate by Kagami Hiiragi
• Broccoli: broccoli-ng-annotate by Gilad Peleg
• Rails asset pipeline: ngannotate-rails by Kari Ikonen
• Grails asset pipeline: angular-annotate-asset-pipeline by Craig Burke
• Webpack: ng-annotate-webpack-plugin by Chris Liechty
• Middleman: middleman-ngannotate by Michael Siebert
• ENB (Russian): enb-ng-techs by Alexey Gurianov

Changes

See CHANGES.md.

Build and test

ng-annotate is written in ES6 constlet style and uses defs.js to transpile to ES5. See BUILD.md for build and test instructions.

Issues and contributions

Please provide issues in the form of input, expected output, actual output. Include the version of ng-annotate and node that you are using. With pull requests, please include changes to the tests as well (tests/original.js, tests/with_annotations.js).

License

MIT, see LICENSE file.

ng-annotate is written by Olov Lassus with the kind help by contributors. Follow @olov on Twitter for updates about ng-annotate.