isorna / material-start

Quick Starter Repository for Angular Material

AngularJS Material-Start

This Material start* project is a seed for AngularJS Materal applications. The project contains a sample AngularJS application and is preconfigured to install the Angular framework and a bunch of development and testing tools for instant web development gratification.

This sample application is skeleton for a typical AngularJS Material web app: comprised of a Side navigation area and a content area. You can use it to quickly bootstrap your angular webapp projects and dev environment for these projects.

> The start app doesn't do much... it just demonstrates how to override a theme and how to use the side navigation component. Try shrinking the window size and watch the sideNav auto-hide. You can temporarily show the sideNav by clicking on the upper left menu button.

Getting Started

To get you started you can simply clone the material-start repository and install the dependencies:

Prerequisites

You need git to clone the material-start repository. You can get git from http://git-scm.com/.

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

Clone material-start

Clone the angular-seed repository using git:

git clone https://github.com/angular/material-start.git
cd material-start

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

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/angular/material-start.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.

Directory Layout

app/                    --> all of the source files for the application
  app.css               --> default stylesheet
  src/           --> all app specific modules
     avatars/              --> package for avatar features
      avatarService.js           --> angular service used to simulate remote dataservices for avatars.
  app.js                --> main application module
  index.html            --> app layout file (the main html template file of the app)
karma.conf.js         --> config file for running unit tests with Karma
e2e-tests/            --> end-to-end tests
  protractor-conf.js    --> Protractor config file
  scenarios.js          --> end-to-end scenarios to be run by Protractor

Updating Angular

Previously we recommended that you merge in changes to angular-seed into your own fork of the project. Now that the angular framework library code and tools are acquired through package managers (npm and bower) you can use these tools instead to update the dependencies.

You can update the tool dependencies by running:

npm update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the package.json file.

You can update the Angular dependencies by running:

bower update

This will find the latest versions that match the version ranges specified in the bower.json file.

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 angular-seed project comes preconfigured with a local development webserver. It is a node.js tool called http-server. You can install http-server 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:

cd app
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.

Running the App in Production

This really depends on how complex your app is and the overall infrastructure of your system, but the general rule is that all you need in production are all the files under the app/ directory. Everything else should be omitted.

Angular apps are really just a bunch of static html, css and js files that just need to be hosted somewhere they can be accessed by browsers.

If your Angular app is talking to the backend server via xhr or other means, you need to figure out what is the best way to host the static files to comply with the same origin policy if applicable. Usually this is done by hosting the files by the backend server or through reverse-proxying the backend server(s) and webserver(s).

Contact

For more information on AngularJS please check out http://angularjs.org/ For more information on Angular Material, check out https://material.angularjs.org/